Gas prices are high. Food prices are increasing. Unemployment is creeping up. GDP is limping along.
And while this is by no means the disastrous economy we experienced during the Carter Administration, it is, by comparison to the Bush Years, a downturn that has people hurting.
The solution is as obvious as it is bold: Rebuild America's energy infrastructure.
Build nuclear plants, oil rigs, gas refineries.
Build wind farms and solar energy sites.
Take the initiative from hostile countries like Russia, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia.
Not only would these actions allow for oil prices to be reduced (remember: speculators are betting on future energy availability) but it would increase the number of good paying jobs as America went to work taking back our future.
That is how America responds to a crisis: with hope, hard work, and innovation.
Rebuilding America's energy infrastructure provides jobs, secondary economic activity, and the energy America and the World needs. It's an energy plan, a job plan, and an economic stimulus plan all rolled up into one.
And it's a plan that fits with the American spirit of getting what we need through hard work and innovation.
But some want us to not get up and work. Rather they propose we sit back and let the Government take care of us.
Don't worry, let the Government provide; no need to work. The watch word for some is "can't"
When Barack Obama told a Pennsylvania audience this past weekend that "We can't drill our way out of this," he was repeating the same line that Nancy Pelosi used days earlier and that Harry Reid used on Wednesday.
The Big Three Democrats are thus all agreed that their party has given up on bringing down the cost of oil and thus the cost of gas at the pump.
"If we reduce our consumption of oil, that's what will reduce gas prices", the presumptive Democratic nominee said in a one-on-one interview with The Post-Crescent during a campaign stop in Kaukauna.
“There’s really no other way of doing it.”
“We can’t drill our way out of the problem because there's just a finite amount of oil out there and you have got increasing demand from countries like China and India.
“And so the way we are going to see gas prices reduced is when we start using the oil that we get, more intelligently than we are doing now.”...“I think the best way to do that is accelerate the second half of our tax stimulus program that would put a couple hundred extra dollars in the pockets of people to cover the immediate spike in gas prices (and) pass a permanent tax cut,” Obama said.
That tax cut, Obama said, would amount to $1,000 per family and would help provide relief from higher costs of gas and food and medical
care. And if Obama could set the price of gasoline to a level Americans can afford, what price would satisfy him?“That’s kind of a hard question,” Obama said. “I’d love gas to be free but it’s not. The fact is we can’t wish our way out of the problem. The price of gas is what it is.
“We have to find a replacement or a set of replacements for fossil fuels.”
To Obama and the Democrats, the American people are supposed to sit back and wait:
Wait for a handout from the government in the form of another stimulus.
Wait for car makers to produce more, government mandated, fuel-efficient cars.
Wait, wait, wait.
Can't, can't, can't.
Produce energy, produce jobs, produce hope.
That's the solution.
Put America to work fixing the problem.
