Deregulate Now

Government regulation of any type needs to go away. Our Federal government tells businessmen, the very people who create jobs, that money they could spend on creating new jobs must be spent on various things that curtail their abilities to create the jobs we, as Americans, depend on.

For instance, companies have to spend untold billions of dollars every year ensuring that their workers have a safe working environment. If they did not have to spend this money on frivolous safety measures, imagine how many more jobs they could create.

Imagine too, how much money businesses could save every year by not being forced to pay workers extra simply because they work more than 40 hours a week. Or, for that matter, a minimum wage. Workers around the world subsist on several dollars a day; we Americans are spoiled to the point that we insist on wages that will pay our bills. Get a second job people. Put your children to work to make ends meet. Whatever you have to do. Your insistence on making a so-called living wage hurts your employer’s ability to hire more workers, thus decreasing unemployment. Also consider that if Americans didn’t insist on such high wages, if our average pay was even less than what other countries have, we would have zero problems with illegal immigration.

And there is another one: why should a businessman have to pay into a pool that continues to pay a worker even after the business no longer needs his services? If wages were kept low enough to inspire hiring, then that worker could easily obtain another job, even after losing his previous one.

Who are we to tell the food industry that they have to spend a fortune on food safety? Without this unnecessary expenditure, they could lower the price of the foods that we buy; thus enabling them to not only make a better profit, but to hire more workers. How many thousands of tons of otherwise good, edible food is thrown out every day simply because it has reached some arbitrary expiration date, or been "contaminated" with some cleaning chemical or other innocuous substance?

What about the drug companies? How many millions of dollars do the pharmaceutical companies have to spend on needless testing of new drugs? If they didn’t have to spend this money, they could then hire even more workers to produce their drugs, thus, again, cutting unemployment. This would also have the effect of lowering drug costs.

The airline industry, already saddled with astronomical losses because of 9-11 and soaring oil prices, could save billions if they could do away with all these silly regulations about how often they have to perform maintenance on their fleets.

And don’t get me started on unions. The TWU is currently in "negotiations" with American Airlines simply because the executives at AA were given millions of dollars in bonuses while the workers themselves took pay cuts. So what? Those executives went to college for the very purpose of being able to have a job with such bonuses. If the airlines and other industries could crush their unions, they could save billions upon billions of dollars in wages and perqs. These savings would allow them to not only hire more workers, but also to pay bigger and better bonuses to their executives, ensuring that they have the best and the brightest at the top.

Drill Here Drill Now... Why?

I truly begin to wonder about people. I heard, the other day, a guy on the radio STILL concerned about the "drill here drill now" thing. Apparently he is under the impression that, if another spike in oil prices happens, we won’t pay as much at the pump if we are drilling every place in the USA that we can.

Seriously folks, think about it. Back last year, when a barrel of Saudi oil was going for $147.00, how much do you suppose a barrel of USA oil was going for? I’m thinking $147.00. What is it that makes people think that Exxon will, out of the goodness of it’s collective heart, sell us oil at $40.00 a barrel when the market has driven it up to over $100.00? If they were going to do something like that, they would have done it last year. They could have, it doesn’t COST $147.00 to produce a barrel. If it did, NO ONE would sell a barrel for $40.00. Which they were doing around election time.

We all need to quit smoking whatever it is we are smoking, stop shilling for the big oil companies who just want to destroy what nature we have left, and get with reality.

As long as we are dependent on oil, it will not matter how many wells we have in Yellowstone, off the coast of Georgia and California, or in Alaska. The price we pay for a gallon of gas at the pump will still be dictated by the Saudis and Wall Street.

We need to demand that our car companies begin to seriously produce oil-independent automobiles. Not the one or two models that SOME produce (most make zero), but ALL of the models need to use as little oil or petroleum products as possible.

I keep hearing folks say that GM got in trouble because of the gas spike and the popularity of the monstrously huge SUV. "We were just building the cars that people want," they said.

Bull. If that is the case, where is my flying car?