Hey Horace. >The main goal of the Energy Legacy Plan I posted a couple years ago was >actually to de-politicise energy development as much as possible. Kerry's >trust fund idea does indeed seem on the surface to do that to some extent, >but any trust plan would have a much better chance of (the required) long >term survival with bi-partisan support.
There are some good moderate Republicans left in the party, they haven't all been driven out by Karl Rove, Tom Delay, and Grover Norquist. It remains to be seen if the adults can retake control of their party. General Jesus and his band of merry oil pirates seems to have gotten their fangs in pretty deep. I used to blame these people when I was younger, now I tend to feel that the willful ignorance of the voters is the real problem. There will always be wolves and sheep, but when the sheep start spreading barbeque sauce on their haunches and dancing before the wolves who's really responsible for the slaughter? >This is of course a really wimpy goal compared to what's possible. >Spending money on incentives for consumers to buy cars, if that's what this >includes, sounds like a boondoggle. If it means increased taxes on fuel >provides consumer conservation incentives, then that makes some sense at >least. I thought my plan for taxing 3 billion a year for 20 years was >pretty wimpy too, compared to what is really needed. With oil at 40 >dollars a barrel now, though, the plan would look a lot better now than >what I forcast. You need to keep a closer tab on things. Oil's at 53 today and shows no sign of decline. It'll be interesting to see what happens after the election. >We don't need a few measly incentives, we need a wake-up call. Agreed. Here's a start, my slightly tongue in cheek Wall St. version of your plan. We start a private trust fund, as you describe. The war chest is going to be much smaller, but we'll not have to deal with the destructive influence of the electorate on how the monies get spent. How do we fund this? By taking long positions on the oil market. Had we invested at the beginning of this year with oil at 32$ we'd have almost doubled our money today. Now you might say, won't we be working towards our own demise by investing in this fashion? Not at all. We'll know when the bottoms going to drop out, and not only will our private company stand to soar as that happens, but we'll be in a perfect position to short all those investments when it happens... How about it Vortex? K.
