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Politics : A US National Health Care System? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RetiredNow who wrote (17590)	5/6/2010 10:22:16 AM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

Totally OT If we don't need oil from the Middle East ourselves, the region would still be very important because much of the world would still need that oil, because a decrease of supply would increase the price of American oil (which would be fine for our producers but our consumers would hardly like it), because if we where oil independent it would be partially on the back of declining American production, with the Middle East holding much higher reserves. Gulf War/Iraq War I, likely would have happened anyway. Once it did Iraq War II could also easily have happened even with "oil independence". All of which ignores the fact that oil independence over that time period was a pipe dream. You may as well say if the moon was made of green cheese than we would save a lot of money. This last war has already cost us $1 trillion and counting. Not that much yet, more like seven or eight hundred billion, a trillion and counting is more like Iraq plus Afghanistan. But lets assume for a moment that we would not have been fighting in Iraq, and that we save $1tril. Adding a trillion to the cost of oil even over the time frame of the Iraq war doesn't get you to the prices your talking about. We've used somewhere vaguely in the neighborhood of 50 billion barrels of oil since the war started. If that is subsidized by a trillion in war spending than the "subsidy" is $20 per barrel. But really even if you do fairly unreasonably count the spending as a subsidy that overstates the case, because we are not continuously at war (so you have to spread the "oil war" costs over peace time years, or years with wars that are not "oil wars"), and because it ignores all the revenue that the feds get from oil and distillates of oil. Add in those factors and its somewhat questionable that oil receives any subsidy even if you do count the war costs as one. If you don't believe that is true, then you would have no problem signing on to a US law that bans our military from securing our oil supplies. That's nonsense either as a policy or an argument. Not counting the cost of law enforcement efforts against bank robbery (as well as a portion of the cost of providing the general deterrence and keeping the peace efforts from law enforcement that help lower the occurrence of bank robbery in the first place) as a subsidy for banks, doesn't suggest that it would be a good policy to not prosecute bank robbery or to disband police forces. Everyone, including the oil companies and Wall Street, needs to stop looking for a handout from the US Taxpayer. That much is true, but it doesn't turn all US government expenses in to hand outs for them. In terms of oil the handout goes the other way around. Oil producers and consumers are net contributors to the treasury, in terms of those activities.