If you look at the history of American innovations which have resulted in technological improvements and led to cheaper and more efficient manufacture and delivery of those products and services, you will find that overwhelmingly, private entrepreneurs (often in conjunction with inventors tinkering away on their own initiative) drove the development of such products.
This applies to the energy industry as well as health care. Strangely, in his pitch for greater government regulation of energy President Barack Obama made the case for less regulation. In a speech at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the president
. . . said the nation’s economic future is tied to its environmental promise, describing innovation as key to righting a flagging economy, saving the globe’s natural resources and ensuring U.S. competitiveness. . . .
“The nation that wins this competition will be the nation that leads the global economy,” Obama said. “I am convinced of that.”
So am I. And to win that competition, we need to unshackle the most productive sectors of our society, cut regulation and lower taxes to encourage innovation.
Unfortunately, the president’s program will do just the opposite.
You are correct, take whatever the left says and just think the opposite. It all means the complete opposite, nice uh. The Democratic party is whacked out. Are we really supposed to take these people seriously??? We all are in big trouble and this country is up against the edge of the cliff. Please pray to your God or whoever you pray to for courage and to open the eyes of the “People”.
Unshackle oil companies! Obama doesn’t know how to unshackle anything or anyone other than terrorists. When I think energy, I think oil and gasoline. My husband got laid off from an oil services company when it became clear Obama would be elected. And it wasn’t just my husband who lost his job. Most of my friends husbands and his friends have gotten laid off too. No one in the media reported how badly the oil industry has been hurt since Obama. And it’s not just oil companies. It’s all the companies that they hire to get the final product. It’s also the towns that have been built up because of the traffic from the oil sector. They are destroyed too. When oil companies are hurting, everyone is hurting. The best thing Obama could do for America is to let us drill here and no windfall profits tax on oil. We’ve got more oil than anyone can imagine. And with technology, drilling is environmentally sound.
Sure, Liz, we have huge amounts of our own oil and natural gas. But pristine fields full of huge windmills are so much more pleasing to the environment than all those drilling rigs. And forget what it costs in energy to build those windmills, they’re just so darn prutty that it will be worth the increased energy costs, just to see them in action (when there is wind).
As long as the Left continues to call CO2 “pollution,” oil and gas are dead in the water. Efforts to “recapture” CO2, along with Cap & Tax, will make oil and gas (to the extent we’re allowed to use it) expensive. Barack intends to make the cost of using coal “skyrocket,” too.
Too many people in Congress, along with their backers/contributors, are positioned to get rich off of “green” energy. They’ll never let cheap energy make a comeback. That’s why they need to be fired in ’10.
Meanwhile, all those out-of-work oil-industry workers make a great case for government-run health care. Gracious me, it’s win-win. For the politicians, I mean.
Barack doesn’t much care about unemployment. He can blame it on Bush for at least the first half of his tenure, then when any rebound occurs (as it surely must, despite all that Barack is doing to injure business), he can take the credit.
Liz, Polly – right on.
One of the things that help to drag us out of the recession in the early 80s was an oil boom (having lived in West Texas, I know of what I speak). Tens (hundreds?) of thousands of people were working in the energy sector. It went a little overboard (the mid 80s bust) but we brought a lot of production online and saw energy costs fall.
Drill, baby, drill!
“But pristine fields full of huge windmills are so much more pleasing to the environment than all those drilling rigs. ”
Until you talk to environmentalists, then they say how bad the windmills are because of the danger to birds and how unsightly they are off the coast of windy Cape Cod…then Ted Kennedy says “no” and passes a special bill to stop the erection of a wind farm. Go figure. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. They want us using oil lamps and beeswax candles again…if only if weren’t for their use of oil and stealing something another species worked so hard to make… oh, maybe we can use torches and stone wheels…. but torches release too much soot into the atmosphere and stone wheels might trample on the habitat of some mouse…and flatten the daisies.
“This applies to the energy industry as well as health care.”
Fascinating. Please point to one medical innovation that happened without any dependence on any government research grant funding.
“We’ve got more oil than anyone can imagine.’
Completely false. We have about 3% of the world’s proven reserves. You have a serious problem with imagination.
#7: Aspirin. Penicillin. X-ray for starters.
And there is far more than that.
Feldmann is certainly correct that in many areas of research Europe is falling behind the United States. Take the development of new drugs. EU Commissioner Günter Verheugen noted that, “in 1992, 6 out of the 10 top medicines in worldwide sales were European, while in 2002 this figure had fallen to just 2.” Moreover, “in 1990, the… pharmaceutical industry still invested 50% more in Europe than in the US… today, the same industry is investing 40% more in the US compared to Europe.”
Or take the gap between Europe and the U.S. biotech industries: the U.S. biotechnology industry employs twice as many people as the European biotechnology industry (190,000 compared to 96,500) and earns twice as much revenue as Europe (€41.5 billion in the U.S. vs. €21.5 in Europe.). The extra employees and revenues translate into more research: indeed, U.S. bio–techs spend on average three times as much on R&D, according to EuropaBio.
In the financial realm, American bio–techs have better access to capital than their European competitors. In recent years European biotech companies have had access to only one–fifth of the private equity available to their U.S. rivals, restricting their sources of funding and, consequently, their research. Moreover, U.S. biotechs have access to 10 times as much debt financing as their European counterparts.
Ultimately, lost or constrained innovation impacts public health. Access to new drugs, for instance, is far superior for American consumers than European ones. For cancer patients, access to new drugs is crucial: a report by the Swedish Karolinska Institute, published in the Annals of Oncology, found that “The United States has been the country of first launch for close to half of the oncology drugs brought to the market in the past 11 years.” The authors of the report observe that “Nearly half of the observed improvement in the 2–year cancer survival rate between 1992 and 2000 at 50 US cancer centers could be attributed to the use of new cancer drugs,” evidence that America’s embrace of new medicines translates into saved human lives.
Interestingly enough, though:
Rather than spend more money on R&D, European governments should address the root causes for why private companies are investing comparatively less on medical R&D in Europe. In 2004, private companies financed 64% of total research expenditures in the U.S., but just 55 percent of total research expenditure in the current 27 EU member states. If anything, Europe suffers not from a lack of government funding of R&D but from an excess.
Compared to the U.S., the role of the state in financing R&D is greater in Europe. Yet having European governments compensate for low private sector expenditures by spending more on research is self–defeating: it allows governments to avoid tackling the root causes of the problem while claiming they are “doing something.”
Of course, to the ignorant child Barack Obama and his mouthpiece Tano, it is inconceivable that any creativity, any innovation, or any intelligence could come from anywhere other than government. Barack Obama is incurious and unintellectual; he is a demagogue whose skin color has insulated him from having to demonstrate any sort of actual knowledge or competence. He truly believes that government is the only source of innovation in this country.
Completely false. We have about 3% of the world’s proven reserves. You have a serious problem with imagination.
Correction. We have 21 billion barrels of proven reserves as defined and 134 billion barrels of estimated undiscovered recoverable resources (the Outer Continental Shelf, ANWR, the National Petroleum Reserve – Alaska, and the Bakken Formation in Montana and North Dakota). In comparison, Saudi Arabia’s total reserves are estimated to be 266 billion barrels.
If that’s not enough, we have the largest oil shale deposits in the world, with a range of 1.5 to 2.6 trillion barrels available to be extracted.
In short, we have nearly six times the oil that we’re tapping in liquid form alone, and massive, far-greater quantities available than that. But unfortunately, screaming pathetic children like Barack Obama and Tano lack the imagination to allow us to utilize it, and instead insist on channeling hard-earned American dollars to petroterrorist countries like Iran while they waste billions of taxpayer dollars on technologies that, compared to fossil fuel extraction, are laughably inefficient just based on simple physics.