Guest column: 'Record Profits'

"Record Profits"
by Richard R. Tennesen

RECORD PROFITS continue to stack up. I know what your thinking. Your thinking about Big Oil. Anytime anyone mentions record profits we think about Big Oil - but that's not what I'm talking about. Perhaps you were thinking more literally about profits in the record industry but again, not so.

Profits are escalating and soon they'll have amassed even greater record profits in one industry - especially if one of the liberal Democrats running for President manages to get into office. The industry is Big Government!

That's right, the bureaucracy that has continued to become larger and larger with tax revenues stacking up higher and higher but unfortunately continues to recklessly spend more and more. Meanwhile, you have to continue working harder and harder to take home enough money to support your family.

The federal budget for 2009 is 3.10 trillion dollars (spelling correct). In other words, Washington is way richer than our 'greedy' friends at ANY big oil company. Our friends Big Government profiteer off the very same fuels we consume at an average just under 50 cents per gallon combined between state and local taxes. Meanwhile, our greedy friends at Big Oil supply us with the fuel we desperately need for our homes, cars, industries. Our greedy friends who collectively pay more in taxes than 75% of the country and must abide by a multitude of environmental standards to produce our fuels as well as those strangling their capacity to drill in areas where oil and fuels are known to exist. The oil companies are not our enemies, my friends.

The government and the media have popularized the terms 'dependence' and 'addiction' to describe our needs of foreign oil. These terms of derision are designed specifically to exclude themselves from the blame and pass it on to the consumer and to the oil companies. The fact is that about 50% of the oil we consume is our own.

The government has no problems spending itself into oblivion with the tax revenues incurred from the fuel purchases nor the revenues from those evil oil companies. We're not the ones addicted - they are.

The government could easily allow us to tap ANWR, allow us to drill off of any of our oil-laden coasts, allow us to produce more nuclear energy, lift some of the environmental impediments to our financial dilemma and allow for us to procure the practically limitless amounts of energy that we have right here before us. We could even consider the tapping of the federal reserve or supporting the gas tax holiday. But who loses out when we do that? Not our greedy friends at Big Oil, but our big greedy friends in Washington.

Allowing the companies the ability to drill for oil and open new refineries would increase production and supply and break us of our imported oil 'dependence' but no refineries have been built in America in over 30 years.

The only way to make more black gold and solve the cost crisis is to put the ink in Washington to good use.

Richard R. Tennesen is a freelance writer based in Pottstown.