United Liberty

One thing I am hearing right now is that Sarah Palin is a fiscal conservative. The Club for Growth released a statement on a potential Palin VP candidacy that praises her stance on earmarks and support for opening ANWR.

Fighting earmarks and opening ANWR are important, but they are only half the battle.

When the Alaska Creamery Board decided to close the state-owned Matanuska Maid Dairy, she objected. She couldn’t fire Creamery Board members, so she fired members of the Alaska Agriculture Board who in turn replaced Creamery Board members. The Matanuska Maid Dairy remained open, jacked up milk prices and eventually closed anyway after substantial losses. Only then did Palin believe that it should be sold to a private company. Unfortunately, the state received no bids for the diary and taxpayers were stuck with a loss.

John McCain has been critical of Barack Obama’s plan for a windfall profits tax on oil companies, correctly citing that it would hurt potential oil exploration in the United States and increase dependence on foreign oil. Criticism should be point toward Sarah Palin as well.

Perhaps no issue places our economy in a pinch and our foreign standing in peril, more than issues concerning oil. The price of a barrel of oil fluctuates, but consistently climbs as the downward fluctuation is always higher than the last low price.

Granted, gas prices at the pump are not going to go down quickly, but we do need to consider how we have found ourselves at the place where we are, so that we might evaluate a sound approach to the issue. Consider the following issues:

1) Primarily due to lack of tax incentives and stringent environmental regulations, we have not seen a new refinery built in the US in the last ten years. At the same time, a new refinery is built every two years in the Middle East.