A fly on the wall...

Wouldn't you like to be a fly on the wall when President Obama and his Jobs Council meet behind closed doors at the White House?  It must be a hoot to watch when a group of overeducated academics and economists and Wall Street bankers get together and try to figure out how to create some jobs when none of them have ever created a job.  Remember, the only jobs Government creates are Government jobs.  So, when a man who's never so much as rented shoes at a bowling alley or served as Night Manager at a 7-11, chooses to surround himself with people who are similarly unqualified to answer this existential question, we, the people who are paying for all this, are bound to get wholly unsatisfying results.

Think about this:  54% of George W. Bush's Cabinet could boast of private-sector experience.  Just 7% of Obama's Cabinet members can make the same claim.  So how could we expect them to create jobs when they've never done so?  Even Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of General Electric and Jobs Council Chairman, one of its few CEO's, just moved all of the thousands of GE's X-ray manufacturing jobs from Milwaukee to China.  Now that's the way to create some jobs!  Oh, and by the way, Immelt's GE paid zero income taxes last year on more than $15,000,000,000 (that's with a "B") of profit!  But during his ten-plus years of stewardship of this blue-chip corporation, he's managed (or mis-managed) to reduce its stock valuation by more than 50%.  Want to buy some GE stock?

As an inveterate entrepreneur with more than 40 years of experience creating companies and hundreds of jobs, let me tell you a fact you might not hear anywhere else.  Entrepreneurs don't start companies to create jobs.  They start companies to make money.  And hopefully to enjoy some job security.  And gain a little freedom.  And be happy.  If their venture is successful, they soon discover that they can't do everything by themselves.  So they have to hire people to keep the ball rolling.  People in manufacturing, and sales, and marketing, and finance, and delivery, and I.T., and human resources, and personnel.  This hiring is nothing but a by-product of their success.  The more successful they are in their enterprise, the more people they hire.  And frankly, employees can be more of a hassle then they are worth.  Most entrepreneurs I know would prefer to have no employees at all.  They hire them because they have to.  I can tell you in my next life I hope to be an author or an artist, living on top of a mountain somewhere in Colorado, travelling into town each Saturday in my Jeep to mail off my creations to my NYC-based agent ,and then buy some beans and flour and cheap wine before heading back up the hill to my glorious solitude.  That's how much of a hassle employees can be.

But no entrepreneur will take an unnecessary risk; if the odds for success are good, they'll pull the trigger and launch the venture.  And anything Government does to lessen those odds, through onerous, confiscatory taxation or stultifying rules and regulations, will reduce the chances that an entrepreneur will take the plunge. 

So when Obama and Company asks themselves how to create some jobs, here's the very simple answer from somebody who knows:  Get Government out of the way!

America presently has the world's highest corporate income tax rate.  That's why there's something approaching $3,000,000,000,000 (that's trillion, with a "T") in corporate profits languishing overseas where it was made.  Bringing it home, repatriating it so to speak, would cost those who made it...and own it...over a Trillion Dollars in taxes.  Would you pay that?  Imagine what this much money could do if sprinkled around our economy by those who might invest it in new plants and materials and ideas and use it to our mutual advantage.

Do these few things and watch our economy thrive:  Simplify the rules and regulations.  Choke off the EPA and the NLRB and the Justice Department and the IRS and their seemingly unending efforts to transform us into Europe-west.  Lower and flatten the income tax rates and don't permit them to increase on January 1, 2013.  Overturn the unconstitutional and terrifyingly expensive Obamacare legislation.  Sign the XL Pipeline in  effect.  Authorize oil drilling in ANWAR, and the Arctic, and the Gulf, and selectively off both coasts.  Allow oil shale and oil sands "fracking," which has created an economic boom in North Dakota and Montana (under 2% unemployment there low enough for you?).  And stop the class warfare pitting one group of Americans against another. 

Will this happen?  Not until we have a President that believes in economic freedom and individual responsibility and liberty.    

What are we Going to do About it?

Not everyone has the time or the inclination to pore over a mind-numbing bunch of D.C.-based blogs looking for the occasional nugget of information worth not only inculcating, but retelling to you, my faithful readers.   


But I do.


And so, the tens of you who care, I found one.  And here it is...


We all know where the President of the United States stands on the subject of energy:  oil, coal, gasoline, Diesel and natural gas are bad; wind, solar, algae, biodiesel, bicycles, Nikes and every single other form of so-called "green" energy is good!


The Redistributor-in-Chief has made it clear that he wants to shut down coal mines, keep new ones from opening, stop oil drilling everywhere, but especially on public lands, and minimize or eliminate altogether "fracking" of rock-incarcerated gasses.  He tried to pass "cap and trade" through Congress while he had complete control over both houses.  He was unsuccessful in doing so because this ridiculous way to buy and sell carbon credits is so ludicrous.  A similar little plan has more than doubled Spain's unemployment rate.  And California's AB 32, cap and trade for the once-golden state, kicks in next year and will force such a job-killing program here.  He is against drilling in ANWAR.  He is against drilling in the Gulf, having tried to end it there.  He is against drilling off either coast.  He is against drilling in the Arctic.  And he is against the XL Pipeline, which would bring almost 400,000 barrels of new oil daily from Canada all the way to Texas refineries.  This pipeline would employ more than 20,000 UNION workers almost immediately and mean more than $8 Billion a year in new revenue, all without a single dollar of taxpayer money being "invested" (Democrat-speak for stealing from the productive and spending it on favored projects).  He has shown us all his antipathy towards this plan by refusing to sign off on it, even though the unions love it and it had already gone through more than three years of exhaustive review and approval by the State Department.  Why?  Because donor-rich groups of eco-terrorists simply hate anything to do with fossil fuels.  And they give the Democrats even more than the unions do.  Shocking!


Through all this, the Campaigner-in-Chief has looked us straight in the face and told us repeatedly he's for an "all of the above" strategy regarding the search for, and the production of, energy.  Apparently he's a proponent of the "a lie repeated often enough becomes the truth" school of political leadership.  In fact, one of his most bold-faced and easily proven lies has to do with his claim that America possesses only 2% of the world's oil, yet we use 20% of all energy.  Plus, he says oil production under his administration is at a 9 year high.  The truth?  We have much more than 2% of reserves and under the TelePrompTer-in-Chief, drilling on public lands is down more than 17%!


I hear you saying, "We want some proof, Mr. Chuckmeister."  Okay, fair reader, here's some proof.


An editor from the Government Accounting Office testified on the subject of energy before the House Science Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment last week.  But instead of learning how horrible things are, she delivered something of a bombshell.  She said:  "The Green River Formation - an assemblage of over 1,000 feet of sedimentary rocks that lie beneath parts of Colorado, Utah and Wyoming - contains the world's largest deposits of oil shale."  This written testimony to the House committee came from Anu K. Mittal, the GAO's Director of Natural Resources and Environment.  


"USGS estimates that the Green River Formation contains about 3 trillion barrels of oil, and about half of this may be recoverable, depending on available technology and economic conditions," Mittal testified.  "The Rand Corporation, a non-profit research organization, estimates that 30 to 60 percent of the oil shale in the Green River Formation can be recovered," Mittal told the Subcommittee.  'At that midpoint of this estimate, almost half of the 3 trillion barrels of oil would be recoverable.  This is an amount about equal to the entire world's proven oil reserves (emphasis mine)!"


Read that last sentence again.  Two or three more times.  The largest remaining reserves of oil on the planet are not in Saudi Arabia or Iran or Dubai or the Emirates, places where they hate us and openly call for our demise.  It's here, in America.  Combine that with massive proven reserves in Canada and Mexico means that North America has more than twice as much oil as the rest of the world combined.  The question then is, what are we going to do about it?


Well, Mr. and Mrs. America, what indeed?  I guess we'll all find out on November 7th...