Our Next National Purpose: The Lexington Project

Senator John McCain has a plan: 

Our nation's future security and prosperity depends on the next President making the hard choices that will break our nation's strategic dependence on foreign sources of energy and will ensure our economic prosperity by meeting tomorrow's demands for a clean portfolio. John McCain has made the necessary choices - producing more power, pushing technology to help free our transportation sector from its use of foreign oil, cleaning up our air and addressing climate change, and ensuring that Americans have dependable energy sources. John McCain will lead the effort to develop advanced transportation technologies and alternative fuels to promote energy independence and cut off the flow of oil wealth to repressive dictatorships like Iran.

Source: The Lexington Project

Commentary

While I do not agree with every aspect of his plan, I believe it is a step in the right direction. Just by announcing our intent to drill more oil here at home would send oil prices lower.

I have problems with McCain's extremely ignorant view on what he calls "speculators". The very word belies a Marxist connotation. If he is against someone betting on prices going up (called going long), then he should be against someone betting on prices going down (going short), and one would think he is against people trading stocks, futures, or other financial instruments just to make money. Someone should educate the Senator on what makes Capitalism work. The markets are the best indicator of how the economy is doing, and makes judgment calls on the worth of companies and entire segments of the economy of far more efficiently than any economist, or group of economists ever could.

I support The Lexington Project just on the merits of using our own resources, which would be better than giving our money to despots in the Middle East. That money would be better spent paying Americans to do the work here. And oil jobs pay well. Very well. I have a friend who works on an oil rig off the coast of Louisiana six months out of the year, and takes the other six months off to do whatever he wants.
 
Something like this could supercharge our economy beyond our wildest creams...and the worst lefty nightmare.