Before you read this entry, please read the Op Ed piece posted in the NY Times yesterday written by Thomas Friedman (thanks for the tip Dan…)

It would be difficult to overstate the stupidity of the proposal advanced by our sitting Senators and Presidential candidates. Friedman has the right of it, reducing the problem to a single sentence:

This is money laundering: we borrow money from China and ship it to Saudi Arabia and take a little cut for ourselves as it goes through our gas tanks.

The only thing Friedman missed is that more than a little cut stays, just look at Exxon’s earnings for this quarter, $10,890,000,000 dollars, that comes to $363M of profit per DAY. But let’s not get too far afield.

Sure folks are saying, but “we should get a gas tax vacation, why should we pay these high prices per gallon of fuel?” Well, what are you really going to get back if this asinine idea goes into effect? Let’s say you burn 10 gallons of gasoline per week. The Federal gas tax is $0.184/gallon. That means you’re going to get a whole $1.84/week back, not enough to buy a loaf of bread or gallon of milk. Over a month? $7.36. Over the 3 months of summer? $22.08. Don’t spend it all in one place.

Friedman hits the mark again when he says:

Few Americans know it, but for almost a year now, Congress has been bickering over whether and how to renew the investment tax credit to stimulate investment in solar energy and the production tax credit to encourage investment in wind energy. The bickering has been so poisonous that when Congress passed the 2007 energy bill last December, it failed to extend any stimulus for wind and solar energy production. Oil and gas kept all their credits, but those for wind and solar have been left to expire this December. I am not making this up. At a time when we should be throwing everything into clean power innovation, we are squabbling over pennies.

To amplify the point, ALL renewables, not just wind and solar, are suffering from this tax incentive mismanagement while the fossil industry (oil, gas, and coal) have, get this, INCREASED their subsidies and research funds. Energy security ===== national security. We have all the resources we need, inside our borders, to be energy self-sufficient within 20 years with existing technologies, if, we only had the vision and will to agree to get it done.

The McCain-Clinton proposal is a reminder to me that the biggest energy crisis we have in our country today is the energy to be serious — the energy to do big things in a sustained, focused and intelligent way. We are in the midst of a national political brownout.

You said it brother.

The only merit I can see in the proposals on the table are windfall taxes on big oil profits. But I have reservations about that as well. My view is corporations and individuals should pay a consistent percentage tax on profits, be they large or small to a certain floor. The math at large is something like this: if our GDP is $14.1T, we should target 20% to reap $2.82T in revenue. Government expenses should be capped at $2T, the balance should be used to reduce our debt levels.

It is actions like this that will stabilize our currency, provide a platform for growth, create new industries, and make the world a little better place. At least one candidate isn’t going for this cheap pandering to voters…