Gov. Perry is On Track to Create a Million Jobs

Republican presidential candidate, Gov. Rick Perry, says his energy plan will "kick start economic growth: and create 1.2 million jobs," and he is correct.  He revealed his "Energizing American Jobs and Security" plan in an October 14 speech at a U.S. Steel plant near Pittsburgh, saying, "We are standing atop the next American economic boom ... energy.... But we can only do that if environmental bureaucrats are told to stand down."

He pointed out:

America has proven but untapped supplies of natural gas, oil and coal. America is the Saudi Arabia of coal with 25 percent of the world's supply. Our country contains up to 134 billion barrels of oil and nearly 1.2 quadrillion cubic feet of natural gas.

Indeed, simply removing the many restrictions that have been placed upon the drilling of oil on public lands and offshore while permitting the drilling of natural gas in our abundant shale deposits would create an economic boom and over a million American jobs.

Perry's energy proposal drew fire from President Barack Obama's campaign and environmental groups. The McClatchy Washington Bureau reported:

"Gov. Perry's energy policy isn't the way to win the future, it's straight out of the past -- doubling down on finite resources with no plan to promote innovation or to transition the nation to a clean energy economy," Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt said.

"The Perry plan would undo safeguards from deadly smog, acid rain, mercury and other pollution," said Daniel Weiss, the director of climate strategy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund. "And it ignores a clean tech future while returning to a fossil fuel past. ... The Perry plan should be stamped 'Made By Big Oil.'"

Texas Democratic Party spokeswoman Rebecca Acuna said Perry's speech "was based on outdated ideas and pure political opportunism. He wants to abolish the Environmental Protection Agency and run the federal government like he runs Texas."

This is the kind of garbage the ultraleft uses to attack opponents instead of debating the issues. It is no coincidence that the principle support of the Kyoto treaty and the anti-carbon emissions programs around the world, based on the theory of anthropogenic (man-caused) global warming, came from the IPCC, a United Nations agency, not from any legislature of any democratic country. Even today, existence of an alternative theory of global warming (and cooling), based upon solar effects and cosmic rays, has been ignored by the mass media. (If you still believe in the anthropogenic global warming theory, click here to watch an excellent lecture by Jasper Kirkby at the Cern, one of the world's most highly respected centers for scientific research.) 

The trillions of dollars that we and the rest of the world have spent on so-called renewable energy was a waste of valuable resources, lowered living standards of workers in the Eurozone and the U.S., and would be justified only when fossil fuels became more expensive, perhaps in the latter part of this century, if then.

Perry correctly points out that the Obama administration is purposely suppressing domestic energy production. For example:

In the Gulf of Mexico, the median time for review of permits for combined deepwater exploration and development has increased 400 percent, while deepwater exploration and development plan approvals have dropped by nearly 80 percent.

The Department of Interior has stopped off-shore exploration off the coast of Virginia over the objections of the Virginia congressional delegation, which has passed a bill in the House to achieve the will of their people. That bill is also supported by their Democratic senators, Webb and Warner.

He has the courage to take on the out-of-control Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). He states:

The third part of my plan is to reform the bureaucracy, in particular the EPA, so that it focuses on regional and cross-state issues, providing scientific research, as well as environmental analysis and cost-comparison studies to support state environmental organizations. We will return greater regulatory authority to the states to manage air and water quality rather than imposing one-size-fits-all federal rules.

I reject the notion that Washington is more committed to environmental stewardship than state and local officials who must live with the consequences of their own environmental policies.

In addition, Perry proposes simplifying our tax code by repealing the many tax credits and subsidies that favor one form of energy over another. And he is the first Texas governor since World War II to reduce general revenue spending. He's used his line-item veto to cut more than $3 billion in proposed spending - more than all other Texas governors combined. The last budget he signed reduced state spending by more than $1 billion. He also maintained Texas' view that borrowing is a last resort, as the Lone Star State has the lowest per-capita debt of any of the large states nationally.

So far so good. But Perry has no program for dealing with the outsourcing of American jobs. We've lost millions of good manufacturing jobs to China, Japan, and Germany. According to Andy Grove, founder and former CEO of Intel Corp:

The great Silicon Valley innovation machine hasn't been creating many jobs of late -- unless you are counting Asia, where American technology companies have been adding jobs like mad for years. ...Today, manufacturing employment in the U.S. computer industry is about 166,000 -- lower than it was before the first personal computer, the MITS Altair 2800, was assembled in 1975. Meanwhile, a very effective computer-manufacturing industry has emerged in Asia, employing about 1.5 million workers -- factory employees, engineers and managers. ... Some 250,000 Foxconn employees in southern China produce Apple's products. Apple, meanwhile, has about 25,000 employees in the U.S. -- that means for every Apple worker in the U.S. there are 10 people in China working on iMacs, iPods and iPhones. The same roughly 10-to-1 relationship holds for Dell, disk-drive maker Seagate Technology, and other U.S. tech companies.

Andy Grove believes a tariff should be imposed on products produced offshore. That is where we come in. We have invented the single-country-variable-tariff which we call the scaled tariff.  Its application to China and the other trade-surplus countries would go a long way to bringing our trade into balance and would create the 5 million American jobs that we have lost to those countries. Unlike specific tariffs, it would not favor one industry over another. The scaled tariff rate would fall automatically as trade becomes more balanced. It encourages our trading partners to remove barriers to imports from us if they want to continue exporting as much to us.  

When testing the waters for a possible presidential run, Governor Sarah Palin advocated balanced trade agreements. Hopefully, Gov. Perry will not stop at the more than 1 million jobs that can be created by substituting American energy for imported energy. He could gain an additional 5 million by requiring balanced trade, thus substituting American manufacturing for foreign manufacturing. If he were to do so, a Republican victory in November would not only "kick-start economic growth," it would lay the foundation for a full-fledged American economic revival.

Disclosure: The authors get royalties from gas wells or own stock in companies that are involved with oil and natural gas production.  They maintain a blog at www.idealtaxes.com, and co-authored the 2008 book, Trading Away Our Future: How to Fix Our Government-Driven Trade Deficits and Faulty Tax System Before it's Too Late, published by Ideal Taxes Association.