By Cong. John Carter
Texas Insider Report: WASHINGTON, D.C. – Four years of President Barack Obama’s regulatory and economic assault on our economy is coming home to roost in summer 2012 to make this a long, hot summer for working Americans. Gas prices at nearly $4 a gallon are choking summer driving. A more than 8% unemployment rate for the 4th year in a row is stifling summer jobs. Now hotel and neighborhood pools could be closed for the season due to the latest batch of federal red tape.
The last time we had a run up in gas prices like this was 2008, as the nation slid into the worst recession since the great Depression.
Americans demanded commonsense solutions that year – cut our reliance on foreign oil by drilling here, offshore, and in Alaska, while pushing for new energy sources including wind, solar, thermal, natural gas, nuclear, clean coal, and hydroelectric. “All of the above”, was the resounding national consensus on how best to expand American energy production and become independent from foreign oil.
What we got instead was the Obama Administration actually standing in contempt of a federal court order to allow renewed oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. the President likewise continued his blocking of new drilling in Alaska.
Oil leases on federal lands and waters have dropped 44% since Obama took office, from 9,929 during the last three years of the Bush Administration, to 5,568 under the first three years of the Obama Administration, according to Bureau of Land Management records.
The only thing that has prevented even higher prices at the pump is that drilling on private land has increased as a result of new private-sector oil technologies that produce oil from fields that were previously of marginal value or closed. yet the Administration has even managed to undermine those efforts, by blocking the critical Keystone Pipeline project that would bring new oil from Canadian shale oil fields to our Texas refineries, creating 20,00 new jobs immediately and another 110,000 in the future.
To add insult to injury, while blocking the private sector from using private money to increase energy and jobs at zero taxpayer expense, the President has spent billions of taxpayer dollars on failed “green” energy schemes of Administration friends like the bankrupt Solyndra solar energy company, while producing not one watt of new power. the only thing green about this Administration’s energy policy is apparently the green going into the pockets of Obama campaign donors.
While spending the nation into our first-ever international credit downgrade through $834 billion in federal stimulus giveaways like Solyndra, the Administration policies have worsened the economic plight of middle-income Americans. as of March, real median household income is down $4,300 a year since Obama took office according to the latest analysis of U.S. Census data by Sentier Research.
All while the unemployment rate remains at 8.2% according to March jobs data. Not only are families earning less, fewer of them are earning anything under the current economic policies. so much for summer jobs for kids. so much for fulltime jobs for parents.
Starting this month, summer 2012 will suffer insult on top of injury. the Administration has decided to demand that every public accommodation pool and sauna in the country will have to offer permanent access for the disabled at every pool and water feature, meaning that portable lifts that can be moved between pools and saunas are no longer acceptable. there currently aren’t enough permanent lifts available to keep our pools open, even if the high cost weren’t an issue. the result will be that across the nation, thousands of hotel and community pools will have a closed sign hanging on the fence.
While pool closings may not change the course of our economy, this red-tape overreach is a prime example of the cumulative drain on our economy and lives of an Administration more focused on extremist policy goals than the economic well-being of middle-income America.
So as Americans sit at home due to high gas prices and lack of earnings, watching the algae grow in the closed neighborhood pool, we need to make sure we remember this long, hot, summer 2012 in November.
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