On Tuesday, the president will deliver his State of the Union message. The con ventional wisdom is that President Obama will continue his “move to the center.”
This undoubtedly means Obama will try to seem as if he’s meeting Republicans halfway on their “reasonable” demands while drawing a stark line against their “unreasonable” ones.
This sort of strategizing leaves most Americans cold. These days, they’re less concerned with “triangulation” than they are with the creation of good jobs that aren’t bogus make-work, or paid for with money borrowed from China or our grandkids.
If that’s true, the solution is right in front of Obama’s face. To echo a chant from the 2008 GOP convention, “Drill, baby, drill!”
The objective case for developing our oil and gas wealth is pretty straightforward. With the exception of climate change, pretty much everything the Obama administration considers a major problem would be improved by opening the floodgates to exploration.
The deficit? The oil industry already pays the US treasury more than $95 million a day in taxes, rent, royalties and the like. If you expand exploration, you expand revenues.
If America unlocked its oil and gas reserves, the government could take in an estimated $1 trillion to $2 trillion more revenue over the coming years. That’s not counting the revenues from the stimulus of lower fuel and energy costs.
Trade imbalances? Domestic oil and gas is, by definition, not imported. The more we produce here, the less we import, or the more we can sell overseas. Either way, the trade deficit goes down and GDP goes up.
Jobs? You can’t drill for American oil or natural gas in China, Saudi Arabia or anyplace other than America. Oil and gas exploration jobs pay more than twice the national average.
Take a gander at North Dakota, where oil production is up 138 percent since 2008. The boom “has helped make its economy almost recession-proof,” writes American Enterprise Institute economist Mark Perry. North Dakota’s “jobless rate never exceeded 4.4 percent even during the Great Recession when the US rate hit 10.1 percent.”
North Dakota, with a $1 billion surplus, and the lowest unemployment rate in the country, has more jobs today than it did when the recession started in 2007. Perversely, as AEI’s Steve Hayward notes, if trends continue, North Dakota may well outproduce California and Alaska (it’s already zoomed passed Oklahoma), not because California and Alaska are running out of oil, but because the feds keep it under lock and key.
The American Petroleum Institute thinks we may have 100 billion barrels of untapped oil; that’s 10 million barrels a day for 30 years, equal to our total imports of foreign oil.
Meanwhile, America could be the Saudi Arabia of natural gas, with an estimated 100-year supply of the stuff, and more being discovered every day.
But what about global warming? Even if you agree that it’s a real problem, we’re stuck with fossil fuels for at least a generation, in part because “green energy” isn’t ready for prime time. Moreover, the developing world won’t much curb its emissions until it has developed.
Obama is fond of saying that we need to look to China’s example. They’re allegedly leading the way on solar and wind power. Maybe that’s true, but what people leave out is that China is hardly curbing its fossil-fuel development.
Why can’t America have a similar do-it-all strategy?
As part of a grand bargain, Obama could, in his Tuesday address, propose quintupling the money we spend doing basic research on alternative fuels, the revocation of subsidies for the oil and gas industry and a hike in the gas tax to pay for the infrastructure bank he wants.
Throw in a ban on mountaintop-removal coal mining while he’s at it. All of this in exchange for creating good jobs here at home, lowering energy costs, reducing our reliance on foreign oil and cutting the deficit.
Sure, the Democratic base and The New York Times would scream bloody murder. But for a guy trying to get re-elected, that’s a bonus.
JonahsColumn@aol.com