The government of the United States has a large number of assets. Some of them we use. Others we leave idle. Of the idle ones, some of them have people lined up, right now, willing to pay good money to buy or lease them. For political reasons the Obama administration is turning down a portion of that money every day. Instead, they would prefer to increase our taxes and have bumped us up against our debt ceiling and are threatening default rather than lease assets for oil exploration, mining, or timber production.
When our executive is in the midst of an unofficial and arguably illegal campaign to leave certain productive assets idle and not permit the logging, oil drilling, and other natural resources exploitation leases that Congress has authorized to take place, it is obscene to insist that increased tax rates must occur to protect these revenue limiting policies.
Let's be clear. These permit slowdowns cost the Treasury money, are not authorized by any statute, and if they would stop would both increase employment and revenue. The NIMBY and environmentalist interests who disproportionately supported this President in 2008 and are poised to do so again in 2012 are making our fiscal crisis worse in a misguided attempt to create idle assets.
We can increase revenue by maximizing our leases. This does not take any act of Congress. Congress long ago did its part of the job. This is a problem created by, and wholly solvable by the President and his political backers who have their people appointed to the posts approving those leases.
We are not maximizing our revenues. We are leaving money on the table and this administration's explicit policy is to take money out of ordinary american's pockets in higher tax rates and keep them unemployed rather than allow the creation of resource extraction jobs. Shouldn't clearing the lease and permit backlog and putting americans back to work be the first priority in these times?
cross posted @ Chicago Boyz
You talking about strip mining your parks? That kind of thing.
ReplyDeleteDesperate people do crazy things. I expect America to do many crazy things as it slides towards bankruptcy.
It's your corporations who own your country. They don't care much about you. They would like to strip mine your parks. You are just an enabler, trained by your overlords to worship at the feet of Mammon.
Can't be much fun.
The stuff I'm talking about has been going on for well over a century, perfectly normal activity. Or have Canadians stopped logging their public lands and I never heard of it?
ReplyDeleteThe Obama administration has been slowing down these ordinary permits because of their political debts to the green movement. That's more important for them than creating jobs that would improve our unemployment rate and our public finances.
But you go right on with your fantasy that this is about crazy, fire sale practices. Don't let reality get in the way of your nice left wing narrative.
We have timber leases which are granted to different companies in useful areas. There is some owned land but not a lot. The criteria is that the land is logged in approved ways.
ReplyDeleteYour Appalachian horror show, been going on for years, perfectly normal activity, is in a whole other category.
We are no saints. The horror in Alberta in the Oil Sands is equivalent to a lot of your nastier practices.
ReplyDeleteIt is amusing to watch the "greatest nation on earth" hunt for change in the couch cushions. Possibly your economic practices have something to do with this. LOL.
Sure our economic practices have something to do with why we're in trouble. The dispute is over which ones were the problem. The caricature of us being 100% laissez faire capitalists would be funny if it weren't so far from the truth.
ReplyDeleteNo we know why. Osama won his war. His purpose was to bleed you. He succeeded well.
ReplyDeleteYour massive military and it's operations in so many countries is the real reason you are broke.
The Chinese also are somewhat to blame. They play you like a fish you know. They will not finance your military anymore, for obvious reasons.
The rest of the world outside of your pampered and bailed out banks is broke. You can only borrow from yourselves now and that will not end well.
The present kerfuffle although stupid and entertaining may be a break point but there are so many on the way it does not matter much.
A rather nice explanation of some of China's machinations. This in respect to China and it's backing of the Euro.:
ReplyDelete"China is being remarkably benevolent... if that doesnt set off big fscking alarm bells in your head then you've obviously never travelled to mainland/HK.
Presume they are waiting for a last fear-bounce on USTs that they'll exchange as collateral to unsuspecting resource nations to lock them into perm servitude.
I can't help but admire the irony that they'll use the USTs (basically dollars) to play the USA's game of debt servitude and this will ultimately collapse the dollar as those nations then try to sell off USTs to buy things cause they can't sell resources for cash - given that it is all promised to China. Then China unpegs RMB and it's off to the races.
game, set, and match. Again, extra points for style with the Chinese using the USTs as weapons of financial mass destruction to get resource lock."