What Obama would “require”

Excerpts from George Will's most recent column with my comments below the star line.

…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. (emphasis added) …

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, whose 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. …

Will's entire column's here.

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Comments:

Yes, and liberals thought the Post Office system could be run at a profit or at least as a break even proposition. When the red ink gushed, their solution was to raise rates and cut services.

Remember the 1930s and agricultural subsidies: the short-term answer to “saving the family farm?” They’re now a multi-billion dollar per year program that props up agri-businesses.

Undaunted by the failures of so many government programs to live up to their promise or produce value for dollars spent, Obama and his fellow liberals press on to “bigger and better” programs they tell the American people they’re “entitled to.”

The man who never ran a Diary Queen and his supporters now have a plan to “give” us government managed health care. After all, it’s our right to have government sponsored health care, just as the Russians and Cubans have theirs.

Meanwhile, Obama can’t decide what to do with the spent fuel rods.

Stay healthy, folks.

Hat tip: Realclearpolitics.com