Stupid as a box of chocolates....

I don't know how many of you all watch Fox News on a regular basis? I try to work in a solid 5-10 hours a week, just know how the other half sees the world.

I have become somewhat inured to the obvious slant of the news reports that they produce, especially if it is about a prominent non-republican. But on "Hannity" last night, I watch a cavalcade of teh stupid the likes of which I have not seen in a long time.

Steve Benen over at The Washington Monthly, gives an excellent round of how inane this is:

If you missed last night's episode of Sean Hannity's Fox News show, you missed a fascinating "discussion" between Hannity, Rep. John Shadegg (R-Ariz.) and Sen. David Vitter (R-La.). As the Fox News personality explained, Shadegg and Vitter have come up with a "stimulus" plan that costs "zero dollars," and "promises to create two million new jobs without any of your money."

Shadegg explained this visionary approach to economic growth:

"With unemployment rates going up how can we produce American jobs? And the answer is we have had a non-energy policy in this country for a very long time. The reality is we are giving jobs to oil fieldworkers and natural gas fieldworkers in Russia and Saudi Arabia and Venezuela, when we should be putting those people to work here in the United States.

"Now Senator Vitter and I have drafted a bill that says let's put Americans to work, let's pursue the fight we had last summer of an all of the above energy strategy, let's clear the bureaucracy out of the way, and let's move forward with American jobs, producing American energy.... And we can also reduce the absurd regulations that go way too far." <emphasis added-R>

Now, I won't bother to point out that point of "stimulus", in its governmental usage, absolutely requires spending. Why? Because the reason for the spending is due to a severe drop in domestic consumer spending. So the government must make up the difference, in order to stave off a severe economic contraction. But those are definitions which have been repeated to no avail.

But that isn't really the stupid part of this. Lets look at the oil industries profits(from 2007) over the last 2-3 years, they have been extreme. Record setting, and most assuredly quite large. Now we can talk about pure revenue or we can talk about returns on equity, but the fact is big oil is doing pretty okay even with all these "absurd regulations that go way too far".

The United States has somewhere south of 3% of of the worlds oil reserves yet consumes more than 30% of the available crude. Some how 2 million jobs can be created from this, for free?

Opening up the Everglades and wetlands, off shore drilling near Florida, the Gulf Coast and California for exploration, will be cheap of course. Considering there is already a two year wait list for boats capable of doing recon and find a suitable site. Then another 1-2 years to build the rig, and finally it will begin producing said oil which will not effect supply at all, because that would be for just one new rig.

Also from my understanding of the leasing process, oil and natural gas, have over 60 million acres of land at their disposal that they currently lease, which they have not even touched yet.

Oil companies could build rigs on this land, but they haven't. It is no secret the leases exist or who they are owned by, but they sit empty. The industries in question have ample resources to capitalize these expenditures, but they don't.

And lets not forget, by no stretch of the imagination would this be free. At best the government would have to give the oil industry billions of dollars in tax breaks or straight up subsidies to do this. This would be inefficient in the extreme. We could do this...or rebuild our electricity grid. I know which

So yeah, dumb and costly.

-Cheers