Time to Get Tough Read Free Page B

supporters are with the rest of the country. They want us to have higher energy prices,
they want to deprive our economy of the fuel it needs to grow, they intentionally put the pseudo-science of global warming and socialist management of our economy—the two go together—ahead of making our economy competitive and creating real private sector jobs for the American people.
    The fact is, you’re not going to see real growth or create real jobs until we get these exorbitant energy costs under control. Someone needs to tell this president that business owners are not the enemy; they’re the people who create jobs. Government can’t create jobs. All it can do is put more people on the taxpayer’s dime. All it can do is sap our nation’s wealth.
    The real way to help the 14.4 million unemployed Americans get their jobs back is not through “stimulus spending” that only has you, the taxpayer, cutting the check for yet more government employees. The real way is limiting taxes, slashing crippling and unnecessary regulations, and keeping commodity and fuel costs low.
    If our “community organizer in chief” would take the time to study the marketplace, he would know that over the past year, things like fruit, pasta, coffee, bacon, and lots of other foods have registered price spikes as high as 40 percent, and there’s no end in sight—in large part because of the price of oil, which has spiked transportation and fertilizer costs. 6 Until we get this country’s lifeblood—oil—back down to reasonable rates, America’s economy will continue to slump, jobs won’t get created, and American consumers will face ever-rising prices.
    We can talk all day about windmills, nuclear power, and solar, geothermal, and other alternative fuels. I’m all for developing alternatives to oil, but that’s for the long term. The fact is, right now and for the foreseeable
future, the planet runs on oil—and that means we need to get the price of a barrel of oil down—way down, maybe even to $20 a barrel—and boy would our economy rock.
    Does Obama do that? No. He goes around the country lecturing everyone that they need to buy hybrid vehicles, before hopping in his carbon-spewing presidential limousine and Air Force One. If he’s really concerned about carbon emissions and air pollution, then maybe he should have grounded his wife before she jetted off with forty of her “closest friends” on a lavish vacation to Spain on the taxpayers’ dime. I’ve got a private jet and love taking my wife and kids on expensive trips too, but there are two differences: I pay for it myself, and I don’t go around waving my finger in people’s faces lecturing them on the evils of travel and restricting their economic freedoms.
    Obama promised he was going to create millions of so-called “green collar” jobs. He used that promise to justify his massive government giveaway of billions and billions of taxpayers’ dollars to green energy companies. We’re now seeing the results of Obama’s promise and big government scheme. Solyndra, a U.S. solar panel company, turned out to be a total bust. They were selling $6 solar panels for $3. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that’s a loser of a business model. But Solyndra’s owner, billionaire George Kaiser, had an inside connection with Obama: Kaiser was a big Obama donor and one of the president’s campaign fundraiser “bundlers.” So the Obama administration fast-tracked a $535 million federally guaranteed loan. Obama believed so much in Kaiser and Solyndra that he made a big public relations event at Solyndra to deliver a speech singing the praises of Solyndra, green jobs, and justifying why taxpayers should foot the bill to
stimulate green companies. Predictably, the company went bankrupt, its 1,100 workers lost their jobs, and the American taxpayer got the shaft, to