700 Billion

This week the news is all about the $700 billion bailout/rescue proposed by Treasury department to fix a perceived “credit crisis.” We all look to the stock market to see the health of our economy and the stock market hasn’t looked good. But, the market hasn’t looked horrible either, certainly not anything that needs a $700B bailout bill. In fact, the market goes up, goes down, goes up, goes down. This isn’t tell us anything. If the Government wants to explain the crisis it has to find something simple, like the Dow Jones average, that shows the problem. I haven’t seen that yet. I don’t know if it exists.

$700 billion came up a few weeks ago, too, in ads from T. Boone Pickens. The $700 billion that we are massively pissed off at giving to Wall Street is the same $700 billion (according to Pickens) that we will pay, every year, to Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Russia and lots of other corrupt, antagonistic, and socialistic countries for their oil. Apparently socialists don’t care so much about global warming or drilling. They like the money we give them.

T. Boone Pickens is a tricky guy. His plan is to use CNG, compressed natural gas (not a “green” solution by modern green standards), as a transportation fuel instead of (in addition too, actually) oil. We have lots of natural gas, but we use it for generating electricity, so he needed to find an alternative energy source for generating electricity. He picked wind. That was the tricky part. You see, by picking wind he is appealing to the “greenies,” our newest religious fanatics. I think T. knows that wind energy will not work, but he figures that showing commercials with windmills will get much more exposure, if not approval, for his plan than showing plumbs of burning natural gas.

Right now there are only two credible transportation fuels (oil and natural gas) and three credible electricity producing fuels (coal, natural gas, and nuclear). The other so-called alternative energy sources do not and cannot produce electricity reliably enough for a modern industrial nation.

The biggest irony of the $700B bailout bill that “taxpayers” are going to have to repay is that only a small number of “taxpayers” are going to pay it. Why? because only a small number of people actually pay the majority of income taxes. On the other hand, the $700B (or whatever the real number turns out to be) in extra gas prices will be paid by everyone, every year, until someone steps up to sell the U.S. public the truth – the only energy source that will bring cheap and clean energy back to the U.S. is nuclear power.