Drill and Burn Republicans

Remember back in the old days, when Republicans would lash out at Democrats calling them “tax and spend liberals”?

Those were the kind of politicians who felt that the best way out of a tight budget situation was to reduce spending, rather than raise taxes. In their mind, it was far better to cut “entitlements” like health-care to the poor than ask the rich to pay more taxes.

By this same logic, these people should now be the first ones to be sending their cars to the scrap heap and riding bicycles and public transit.

Right now we are in a worldwide budget crisis. We are spending oil at a rate that is most likely not very sustainable. A prudent conservative person would understand this, and realize that rather than solve the problem through more drilling (taxes) we should solve the problem through conservation (spending cuts).

Obviously, logical behavior is in even shorter supply than oil. This is too bad, because I think that most Republicans, if they really thought about the issue more deeply, would understand that ideas such as offshore drilling are no more a long-term solution to the oil crisis than tax hikes are a solution to a budget problem.

In both situations, the conservative person should be calling for conservation, and a general reduction of wasteful usage of resources.

Until then, I’m gonna call these guys drill and burn Republicans.

Thursday July 10, 2008