George Will Can say Obama's policy is a Fairytale

Obama's Economic Fairytale

George Will puts it in common sense perspective !


WASHINGTON --'' Barack Obama has made his economic thinking excruciatingly clear, so it also is clear that his running mate should have been not Joe Biden, but Rumpelstiltskin. He spun straw into gold, a skill an Obama administration will need in order to fulfill its fairy-tale promises.

Obama recently said he would "require that 10 percent of our energy comes from renewable sources by the end of my first term -- more than double what we have now." Note the verb "require" and the adjective "renewable."

By 2012 he would "require" the economy's huge energy sector to -- here things become comic -- supply half as much energy from renewable sources as already is being supplied by just one potentially renewable source. About 20 percent of America's energy comes from nuclear energy produced using fuel rods, which, when spent, can be reprocessed into fresh fuel.

Obama is (this is part of liberalism's catechism) leery of nuclear power. He also says -- and might say so even if Nevada were not a swing state -- he distrusts the safety of Nevada's Yucca Mountain for storage of radioactive waste. Evidently he prefers today's situation -- nuclear waste stored at 126 inherently insecure above-ground sites in 39 states, within 75 miles of where more than 161 million Americans live.

But back to requiring this or that quota of energy from renewable sources. What will that involve? For conservatives, seeing is believing; for liberals, believing is seeing. Obama seems to believe that if a particular outcome is desirable, one can see how to require it. But how does that work? Details to follow, sometime after noon, Jan. 20, 2009.

Obama has also promised that "we will get 1 million 150-mile-per-gallon plug-in hybrids on our roads within six years." What a tranquilizing verb "get" is. This senator, who has never run so much as a Dairy Queen, is going to get a huge, complex industry to produce, and is going to get a million consumers to buy, these cars. How? Almost certainly by federal financial incentives for both -- billions of dollars of tax subsidies for automakers, and billions more to bribe customers to buy these cars they otherwise would spurn.

Conservatives are sometimes justly accused of ascribing magic powers to money and markets: Increase the monetary demand for anything and the supply of it will expand. But it is liberals like Obama who think that any new technological marvel or other social delight can be summoned into existence by a sufficient appropriation. Once they thought "model cities" could be, too.

Where will the electricity for these million cars come from? Not nuclear power (see above). And not anywhere else, if Obama means this: "I will set a hard cap on all carbon emissions at a level that scientists say is necessary to curb global warming -- an 80 percent reduction by 2050."

No he won't. Steven Hayward of the American Enterprise Institute notes that in 2050 there will be 420 million Americans -- 40 million more households. So Obama's cap would require reducing per capita carbon emissions to levels probably below even those "in colonial days when the only fuel we burned was wood."

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/art...fairytale.html

as if watching guys like Tommy Lasorda [many years retired, thankfully] waddle around in overly tight-fitting stretch pants, expectorating like a madman, and grabbing his private parts like a baboon in heat is something to wax poetic over.

Hey, when you're a weasely little bowtie-wearing nebbish like Will, who probably never got picked to play when he was a kid, and who probably didn't know which end of the bat to swing with, and who probably had two left feet, I understand why you would think so. It's some great thing you'd love to be able to do, but can't.  So you love it from afar. Some of the rest of us know better, however.

None of this however, necessarily discredits his analysis.  It's the analyst about who i have doubts.





-- Modified on 8/26/2008 10:29:04 AM

-- Modified on 8/26/2008 10:42:29 AM

but it doesn't make him any less on target when it comes to Obama. Obama has been trying to tell us that 2+2 =12 for months now. He could pass a dozen resolutions requiring the sun to rise in the west, it still isn't going to make it happen.

The man hasn't spent five minutes in running anything, but he is going to magically fix all of our problems. I imagine he will enlist the help of "Miss Natural gas is not a fossil fuel" to fix our energy crisis.

well, there's one problem he CAN fix -- he ain't Bush.  I don't know if that's enough to wager the homestead on a single roll of the dice, though.

Kind of like Carter made us actually miss Nixon.

"Posted by XiaomingLover1  "as if watching guys like Tommy Lasorda [many years retired, thankfully] waddle around in overly tight-fitting stretch pants, expectorating like a madman, and grabbing his private parts like a baboon in heat is something to wax poetic over".



 roflmao.. and others enjoy the more constant butt slapping comradery of football and basketball..

The entire nuclear power generation is nothing more than pandering to special interest.

97% of nuclear wast can be reprocessed and reused called MOX. Even though Europe, Japan, and India have been doing this for 30 + years, our esteemed dumb ass politicians thinks it is dangerous.

1000 MWE Nuclear power plant uses about 50,000 pounds of Uranium producing about 1,500 Lbs of waste per year. Compare this to 1000 MWE coal fired plant using 3.2 Tons of coal and the amount of carbon spewed into the air.

Without tapping Nuclear power as an alternate energy source Obambi is making 2+2 = 22.

with 2 out in the bottom of the 9th [7th game of the World Series is optional], other times you're caught looking for a called 3rd strike in the identical circumstances.

Has it ever been proven in the US that nuclear plants can be built and operated at a profit without deep government subsidies?

Nuclear power is the cheapest per unit to produce. Don't believe any of the Nuclear Power Plants owned and operated by utility companies are subsidized.

I may be wrong

just hedging their bets and looking toward the post-petroleum world.

So then why is everyone so upset with them?  sounds like they're just being prrudential and forward-looking.