A real stimulus that would produce revenue instead of debt

Connie Hair:

Republicans introduced in both the House and the Senate yesterday a bill entitled the No Cost Stimulus Act of 2009. This breathtakingly simple energy stimulus bill introduced by Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) and Rep. Rob Bishop (R-Utah) would accelerate offshore on the Outer Continental Shelf and in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge and force the government to streamline the environmental and regulatory burdens that could otherwise block energy development for years.

At a press conference yesterday, Vitter and Bishop explained that this bill would be a literal “threefer”: it creates tens of thousands of jobs, helps reduce dependency on foreign oil and gives America time to develop other sources of inexpensive energy. Vitter said, “We need to continue to work to stimulate the economy, but we can’t continue to borrow huge amounts of money to do it. So this is an energy plan, both traditional and renewable energy, that can create significant jobs, significant economic growth, without costing the U.S. taxpayer one cent and without having to borrow more money.”

He explained, “First, we significantly expand OCS leasing and energy production on the Outer Continental Shelf. Second, we go into an initiate ANWR leasing, energy production in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge. Doing these things not only doesn’t cost taxpayers dollars, it creates significant new federal revenue. What we do with a lot of that federal revenue is to create a clean and renewable energy trust fund dedicated to clean, renewable energy programs. The impact of that fund and that amount of federal spending in those areas is more significant than in the stimulus bill on the clean and renewable side. Just on the clean and renewable energy side, we have more positive impact in terms of those programs which already exist than the stimulus bill recently passed. The other major part of the bill is regulatory streamlining to again allow domestic energy production to move forward. That’s the basic idea of the bill.”

There is a constant and deliberately deceptive drone by Democrats to the media that Republicans are the party of “no” and “no ideas.” Yet Republicans at every turn have offered free-market solutions to counter the Democrat-induced sub-prime mortgage debacle, exacerbated by the Democrat Fannie & Freddie protection racket that initiated the economy’s plunge into meltdown. Never wanting to waste a good crisis, the Democrats choose to spend this nation into a big-government stupor while saying “no” to every free market solution Republicans have offered.

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Democrats will likely oppose this bill but the voters clearly support it and the GOP needs to be pushing it in a very public way. This provides with energy we can use now and provides revenue to the government to pay down the massive debt the Democrats are building. It also creates thousands of well paying jobs at a time when unemployment is growing. The Democrat carbon phobia will need to be overcome, but the voters will back this plan and we need to make Democrats pay a political cost for opposing it.