If anyone remembers the pathetic Presidency of Jimmy Carter, they will cringe from the words from IBD below:
Posted 5/31/2006
Energy Policy: HillaryCare's back, this time in the form of an energy plan that's as bad for the health of our economy as the Clinton health care plan was for your health and that of your family.
In a nearly hourlong speech last week, New York senator and presidential wannabe Hillary Clinton outlined her plan for the nation's energy future. If it sounded familiar, it should. It combines the worst features of her failed attempt to micro-manage health care and President Carter's failed energy policy.
For those with short memories, the Clinton administration in 1993 sought to nationalize America's health care system — about one-seventh of the economy — based on a plan hatched in the deliberations of the then-First Lady's secretive health care task force.
The administration followed a 239-page draft of its plans with a 1,342-page bill, the Health Security Act. It called for a massive top-down bureaucratic command-and-control system that would have meticulously governed every aspect of the delivery and the financing of health care services.
The plan died when people realized that turning health care delivery over to what amounted to a Department of Motor Vehicles on steroids would result in poorer service at higher prices. Many credited the tsunami that swept Republicans into power in 1994 to the Big Brother nature of Mrs. Clinton's plan.
Well, she's back with another attempt to have government seize control of yet-another major part of our economy — energy. And once again she's ignoring the historical lesson that a free market that encourages rewards for risk-taking and innovation is the best solution for any problem.
Clinton proposes a $50 billion "Strategic Energy Fund" that would siphon off oil companies' "excessive" profits — not unlike the windfall profit tax, repealed after it succeeded only in discouraging domestic energy production while increasing foreign imports.
Her fund is supposed to promote alternative energy development. So was Jimmy Carter's long-defunct SynFuels Corporation.
As we have stated many times, the government collects as much as four times in taxes the amount oil companies earn in profits, which are then plowed into finding new energy sources. As a percentage of sales, these "excessive" profits are lower for the oil companies than for companies in many other industries.
Mrs. Clinton also claims "we worked our way out of the last big energy crisis in the '70s and early '80s almost entirely through conservation." No, we worked our way out because we undid Carter's energy plan, the only feature of which that worked was his sitting in front of a fireplace wearing a sweater.
We worked our way out because we did away with the windfall profit tax, rescinded price controls and drilled for oil in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, a source that recently delivered its 15 billionth barrel through the Alaska pipeline.
Oil from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) could meet all petroleum needs of Sen. Clinton's "home" state of New York for 34 years, yet she opposes getting it.
After Hurricane Katrina crimped our energy supply line, Mrs. Clinton maintained that "it makes no sense to respond to a disaster in the Gulf (of Mexico) by making a disaster in Alaska." This from a senator who voted no fewer than nine times to block drilling in a tiny, frozen part of ANWR, and whose husband first blocked ANWR development in 1995.
What really makes no sense is to punish those who take the financial risks to develop available sources of energy while placing vast stores of domestic energy off limits. The marketplace, not another proposed federal bureaucracy, should pick winners and losers, whether in health care or energy.
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