OIL - You better be sitting down when you read this!

OIL… And Energy Independence

As you may know, Cruz Construction started a division in North Dakota just 6 months ago. They sent every Kenworth (9 trucks) we had here in Alaska to North Dakota and several drivers.

They just bought two new Kenworth's to add to that fleet; one being a Tri Drive tractor and a new 65 ton lowboy to go with it. They also bought two new cranes (one crawler & one rubber tired) for that division.

Dave Cruz said they have moved more rigs in the last 6 months in ND than Cruz Construction moved in Alaska in the last 6 years.

Williston is like a gold rush town; they moved one of our 40 man camps down there since there are no rooms available.

Unemployment in ND is the lowest in the nation at 3.4 percent last I checked.

See anything in the national news about how the oil industry is fueling North Dakota 's economy?

Here's an astonishing read. Important and verifiable information:

About 6 months ago, the writer was watching a news program on oil and one of the Forbes brothers was the guest.

The host said to Forbes, "I am going to ask you a direct question and I would like a direct answer; how much oil does the U.S. have in the ground?" Forbes did not miss a beat, he said, "more than all the Middle East put together."

The U. S. Geological Service issued a report in April 2008 that only scientists and oil men knew was coming, but man was it big.

It was a revised report (hadn't been updated since 1995) on how much oil was in this area of the western 2/3 of North Dakota, western South Dakota, and extreme eastern Montana.

Check THIS out:

The Bakken is the largest domestic oil discovery since Alaska's Prudhoe Bay, and has the potential to eliminate all American dependence on foreign oil. The Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimates it at 503 billion barrels.  Even if just 10% of the oil is recoverable,   (50.3 billion barrels) at $107 a barrel, we're looking at a resource base worth more than $5.3 trillion.

"When I first briefed legislators on this, you could practically see their jaws hit the floor.  They had no idea.." says Terry Johnson, the Montana Legislature's financial analyst.

"This sizable find is now the highest-producing onshore oil field found in the past 56 years", reports The Pittsburgh Post Gazette.

It's a formation known as the Williston Basin, but is more commonly referred to as the 'Bakken.'

It stretches from Northern Montana, through North Dakota, and into Canada.

For years, U. S. oil exploration has been considered a dead end.  Even the 'Big Oil' companies gave up searching for major oil wells decades ago.

However, a recent technological breakthrough has opened up the Bakken's massive reserves, and we now have access of up to 500 billion barrels. And because this is light, sweet oil, those billions of barrels will cost Americans just $16 PER BARREL!

That's enough crude to fully fuel the American economy for 2041 years straight. And if THAT didn't throw you on the floor, then this next one should - because it's from 2006!

U. S. Oil Discovery - Largest Reserve in the World  Stansberry Report Online - 4/20/2006

Hidden 1,000 feet beneath the surface of the Rocky Mountains lies the largest untapped oil reserve in the world.  It is more than 2 TRILLION barrels. On August 8, 2005 President Bush mandated its extraction.

In three and a half years of high oil prices none has been extracted.

With this mother load of oil why are we still fighting over off-shore drilling? They reported this stunning news: We have more oil inside our borders, than all the other proven reserves on earth.

Here are the official estimates: 8 times as much oil as Saudi Arabia, 18 times as much oil as Iraq, 21 times as much oil as Kuwait,  22 times as much oil as Iran, 500 times as much oil as Yemen, and it's all right here in the Western United States.

HOW can this BE?  HOW can we NOT BE extracting this?

Because the environmentalists and others have blocked all efforts to help America become independent of foreign oil!  Again, we are letting a small group of people dictate our lives and our economy. WHY?

James Bartis, lead researcher with the study says we've got more oil in this very compact area than the entire Middle East , more than 2 TRILLION barrels untapped. That's more than all the proven oil reserves of crude oil in the world today, reports The Denver Post.

Don't think 'OPEC' will drop its price even with this find?  Think again!  It's all about the competitive marketplace, it has to.

Think OPEC just might be funding the environmentalists?

Got your attention yet?  Now, while you're thinking about it, do this: Share this. If you don't take a little time to do this, then you should stifle yourself the next time you complain about gas prices, by doing NOTHING, you forfeit your right to complain.

By the way, this can be verified. Check it out at the link below.

http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/article.asp?ID=1911

Cruz Construction: http://www.cruzconstruct.com/

Oil is the answer to our independence, fixing our entire economy and turning America’s decline around!!  The Republicans in Congress are trying force our Progressive Green President’s hand by adding the Keystone Pipeline Project to the tax deal presently in play.  Even many Democrats agree that the Keystone Pipeline should be approved now rather than in a year from now, as Obama has had it pushed back to, for even just serious consideration.  As the Republicans and reasonable Dems have pointed out… The Keystone Pipeline would create needed jobs, including many for military men and women who are now coming home that will increase unemployment if there aren’t any new jobs created.

Obama and his Progressive team and supporters are stealing American jobs and energy independence in the name of their ideological agenda by halting the expansion of the Keystone pipeline, in the name of their created Green energy goals. Then Obama has approved deep water drilling in The Gulf for Brazil, where were can’t drill, and will allow Canada to rapidly expand production of oil from “tar sands”, affecting our environment without any job or energy rewards and will end up turning around purchasing their oil either directly or from China, who they will be selling to.

Ask Marion~ -  h/t to Deonia Copeland

Now I just wonder what would happen in this country if every one of you sent this link to every one in your address book.

Trump to OPEC: Oil Should Be $40-$50 a Barrel. not $150

Mitt Romney on U.S. Energy & Oil Independence

GOP on Keystone Pipeline Delay: ‘Utterly Irrational’ 

Fracking Butter and the EPA’s Fracking Report

** Obama has become so arrogant that even left leaning 60-minutes edited out Obama’s laughable claim that he is the 4th best President. **

Gore tells Watergate reporter American people know nothing about Clinton White House

Bob Woodward: sitting next to Gore 'taxing' & 'unpleasant'

An interesting series of quotes came from Bob Woodward recently about Al Gore - calling the former Vice President 'taxing' and 'unpleasant' to sit next to after a recent event he shared with the VP. Even worse, Woodward admitted he asked Gore how much the public knows about what went on during the Clinton administration. The answer: 1%, a number Woodward says made him feel 'icky'. Even ickier - Woodward waited 6 years to make this information public. Glenn Beck reacts on radio today. WATCH

Video: Glenn Reacts to Woodward Comments On Gore…

Woodward is no stranger to corruption in the White House as he helped expose President Nixon’s crimes and abuse of power to the public.

The Hill reports:

In a speech at the Organization for International Investment’s annual dinner at D.C.’s Ritz-Carlton Hotel on Thursday, the famed Washington Post journalist, who helped uncover the Watergate scandal, disclosed that he doesn’t enjoy the former vice president as a tablemate.

…

Woodward offered up another tidbit from the conversation with his dinner companion. The investigative reporter asked the politician, more than five years after leaving office, how much the public knows about what went on during the Clinton administration. Gore replied, “One percent.”

Woodward admitted that revelation made him feel a bit icky, saying, “I kind of died inside and have to confess to having an unclean thought.”

Obama the Destroyer

If somebody were deliberately trying to undermine the very fabric of these United States, he would first vow not just to change its policies but to completely "change America," and then would do just about everything Barack Obama already has begun to do as president.

To undermine this nation, he would attack the essential sanctity of contracts -- exactly as Obama has done. Never mind the "contracts" clause of the Constitution -- who needs to get hung up on the Constitution's actual language when "empathy" is more important?

For that matter, he would denigrate the whole notion of equal justice under the law by criticizing the whole notion of a judge as a neutral umpire. And he would employ, as a senator, outrageous and unprecedented means -- the filibusters of judicial nominees -- to block judges who don't agree with his own choices of who deserves more "justice" than whom.

To undermine this nation, he would selectively release only those portions of intelligence memos that make his nation look bad, but not those that provide context and reasonable motivations for the subject of the memos. And he would selectively edit memos from his own intelligence director to eliminate his statements in support of the effectiveness of the policies discussed in those other memos -- and his statements supporting the motives of those who adopted those policies in protection of their fellow citizens. And he would leave open the possibility of prosecuting earlier administration's lawyers merely for giving legal advice he disagrees with.

To undermine this nation, a president would go on a spending binge so incredibly wild that annual deficits and national debt would reach frightening proportions before most Americans could even absorb the arithmetic of it all. He would be utterly reckless with our grandchildren's tax money, but would turn around and achieve savings -- minor savings at that -- only by cutting or even gutting defense forces.

He would stop paying for missile defenses. He would stop planning for forces strong enough to handle two regional wars at once, and would concentrate only on counterinsurgency needs while hollowing out our conventional forces. He would repeatedly insult our closest ally (Great Britain) while kowtowing to enemies such as Iran, Venezuela, and Nicaraguan communists. He would travel the world repeatedly apologizing for supposed American sins while failing to defend the USA from verbal assaults from tinpot dictators.

He would submit budgets that would eliminate funding for an already authorized border fence, and nominate as top lawyer of the State Department a man who openly mocks the legal underpinnings of American sovereignty.  He would propose raising taxes on corporations, on soft drinks, on investors, on savers, on the grieving families of dead people, on small businesses, and on every family that uses public energy sources.

And worst of all, he would propose unprecedented and underhanded use of a parliamentary maneuver called "reconciliation" to ease the way to an irrevocable government takeover of an entire major sector of the economy -- health care -- without adequate debate and with firm knowledge that the takeover could lead to serious health carerationing and even government-determined decisions on life and death.

To undermine this nation, he would throw out more than two centuries of economic freedom in favor of a modern-day version of Mussolini's economic fascism.

He would refuse to prosecute vote fraud or even guard against it, while repeatedly awarding financial grants to organizations such as ACORN that have been accused of vote fraud on multiple occasions in multiple states. He would stack his Justice Department with highly politicized left-wingers. He would fail, until put directly on the spot, to offer the slightest rebuke to his hand-picked, ethically compromised Attorney General when said AG calls his fellow citizens "a nation of cowards."

In short, to undermine the United States, the president would, as fast as possible, create a massively debt-ridden, tax-ridden, regulation-ridden government whose prosecutors play political favorites but whose stances on the world stage are marked by weakness, self-criticism, and solicitousness towards one's enemies.

Surely this president has other motives. But even if his intentions are good, we all know the substance of the pavement on the road to perdition.

By Quin Hillyer on 5.15.09 @ 6:09AM - a senior editorial writer at the Washington Times and senior editor of The American Spectator.

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• American Progressivism

Posted:  Knowledge Creates Power

Progressive Taxation Was Never About Fairness

Societies that use tax law as a way to achieve political or social goals are societies based on envy and resentment. That is, how a nation treats taxes tells you something of the character of a nation.

So when you hear anyone say that the level of taxation in a country should be based on the “ability to pay”, be very afraid. These people are not only coming for your money. They’re coming for your economic liberty too. Ultimately, that means they’re after your political liberty as well.

Progressive taxation is the idea the larger your disposable income, the larger percentage of that income you ‘should’ pay in taxes. Proponents of it — and these days nearly everyone one is — claim it is more ‘fair.’ But let’s be honest and call things by their right names and say what progressive taxation is really about.

Even John Stuart Mill, who favoured it, called progressive taxation “a mild form of robbery.” That’s because progressive taxation is about using the tax code to redistribute wealth. It’s base on the class-warfare idea that the rich get rich illicitly and conspire to keep the riches of society for themselves. It uses the law (coercion) to correct what some people see as the social and economic injustice meted out by the marketplace.

But how people treat private property (and wealth IS private property) determines the character of society. A society that promotes the idea of wealth accumulation and that everyone can get rich is one in which standards of living will rise over time. It doesn’t mean getting wealthy is the only or even the most important ambition in life. That’s a matter of personal choice and values. But it just means that if you want to raise standards of living over time, you should guard economic liberty and not use taxation to punish personal incentives.

The only fair argument for progressive taxation is that indirect taxes (consumption taxes) hit the poor harder than they hit the rich. This is certainly true for taxes on consumption goods. But it is not true for income taxes, most of which the poor do not pay anyway. A tax on Gucci handbags is less onerous than a tax on a slab of beer. But that doesn’t justify the argument that just because you can pay more taxes, you should.

When is it ever right for a man to come in to your home and take what’s yours simply because he’d decided that someone else needs it more? And how is the government arbitrarily deciding to raise income tax rates on only certain citizens, based on their ability to pay, any different? Yet that’s the argument for progressive taxation in the modern world. And most people seem to think it’s fair and just.

Mind you, that doesn’t mean that free people can’t use legislatures to levy taxes in order to pay for projects they believe should be provided by the State, like roads, bridges and other infrastructure. But there is a difference between that kind of public spending and public spending financed by wealth redistribution to achieve particular social and economic outcomes.

How did we get to the point in civil society where a democratic majority that does not pay taxes can, through its elected representatives, legally confiscate the wealth of a minority? Friederich Hayek gives the history in, The Constitution of Liberty.

“As is true of many similar measures, progressive taxation has assumed its present importance as a result of having been smuggled in under false pretences. When at the time of the French Revolution and again during the socialist agitation preceding the revolutions of 1848 it was frankly advocated as a means of redistributing incomes, it was decisively rejected. ‘One ought to execute the author and not the project,’ was the liberal Turgot’s indignant response to some early proposals of this sort.

“When in the 1830’s they came to be more widely advocated, J.R. McCulloch expressed the chief objection in the often quoted statement: ‘The moment you abandon the cardinal principle of exacting from all individuals the same proportion of their income or of their property, you are at sea without a rudder or compass, and there is no amount of injustice and folly you may not commit.’”

“In 1848,” Hayek continues, “Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels frankly proposed ‘a heavy progressive or graduated income tax’ as one of the measures by which, after the first stage of the revolution, ‘the proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeois, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the state.’

And these measures they described as ‘means of despotic inroads on the right of property, and on the condition of bourgeois production...measures...which appear economically insufficient and untenable but which, in the course of the movement out strip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of production.’”

If Marx and Engels are to be taken at their word, progressive taxation was never about fairness. It was about putting production “in the hands of the State” and “revolutitionising the mode of production.” In the world of State-run capitalism, this is what we seem like we’re headed towards.

Now, we can take a step back and ask whether a State-run, union owned Chrysler makes a better car than the shareholder owned management-run Chrysler. It’s a fair enough question. We’d argue that government-built and designed cars are going to be about as appealing as a leather boot for breakfast. But that is not really the point.

The point is that the politicians are lying to you about the goal of progressive taxation. The goal is not to produce more “fairness” or “social justice.” It’s to place the State at the centre of economic production, so it can regulate and tax with impunity.

There is both a psychological and crassly economic motive to this movement to displace the free market with the State as the organiser of economic life. The smarty pants elitists in both political parties, with their ties to union and corporate money, really believe the world would be better off it was run be benevolent bureaucratic despots. Or maybe using coercive taxation to steal from the rich is simply envy-based class politics, a kind of populist theft conducted with the consent of a hi-jacked system for passing laws.

Once you go down this road of socking it to the rich instead of reducing spending, you get higher and higher rates of taxation that eventually shrink the economy. Britain adopted the income tax in 1910 and the U.S in 1913. At the time, the top tax rates on income were 8.25% and 7% respectively. Yet within 30 years, thanks to the Great Depression and the World Wars, those rates had risen to 97.5% and 91% respectively.

“Thus in the space of a single generation,” Hayek writes, “what nearly all the supporters of progressive taxation had for half a century asserted could not happen came to pass...All attempts to justify these rates on the basis of capacity to pay was, in consequence, soon abandoned and supporters reverted to the original, but long avoided, justification of the progression as means of brining about a more just distribution of income.”

How much a man should reasonably a pay to the State was no longer an economic question about his ‘ability to pay.’ It was revealed as the purely political decision it always was. Or as Hayek says, it’s “an attempt to impose on society a pattern of distribution determined by majority decision.”

That’s what we meant by the character of society. Do you want to live in a country where over 50% of a man’s income can be taken from him simply because the majority votes for it? In that kind of country you want to live in, where you have no real property rights and you don’t have equality before the law.

Upward income mobility is undermined in this kind of society. People don’t try to get rich because there’s no point in it if your gains are going to be confiscated. The net result of decades of progressive taxation is lower capital formulation, more consumption, less production, and ultimately a lower standard of living for everyone.

In that society, your only means of social and economic advancement is based on your personal connections and political patronage. Not surprisingly, in that society, politicians exercise enormous power. And decisions are not made by businesses that aim to offer consumers better products and services at lower prices; they are made by politicians who aim to cement their electoral position by favouring certain constituencies.

Progressive taxation has nothing to do with fairness, justice, or equality. It is unfair, unjust, an unequal. But hey, if that’s the kind of country you want to live in, or if you’re someone who’s getting the check instead of writing it, that might not seem like such a bad deal.

We’d just advise you to prepare for a lifetime of dependency on busybody politicians who become increasingly grasping, moralistic, and intrusive. If you’re a free man, you’d better pack your bags and look for some other luckier country.

This is not to glorify getting rich as the most important thing in this world (or any other world.) It isn’t. And there are much more important things in life. Whether you choose to pursue material gain is up to you.

And just as a government should not use the tax code to punish the rich, it ought to quit tinkering with it and providing so many deductions and rebates that allow anyone with a good accountant to avoid paying large income taxes. A much simpler taxation system based on consumption would be fairer for everyone and it would force the government to finally live within its means.

Of course that probably won’t happen. Ever. But it would be nice to think so. In the meantime, a society that discourages wealth creation and capital formation through so-called progressive taxation is eventually going to make itself a lot poorer and a lot less free.

Regards,
Dan Denning - dailyreckoning.com.au

Source: Whiskey and Gunpowder

 

American Progressivism

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• The Fair Tax Official Site

Posted:  Knowledge Creates Power