With our national debt at $15.4 trillion, unemployment at 22.5 million, and our gross debt to GDP ratio at 102.9 percent it feels like America is digging itself ever-deeper into a hole of destruction.
Economist Peter Ferrara in Forbes magazine cites the fact that, last year, America’s average economic growth was a mere 1.3 percent. If America continues on this path, our standards of living will decrease by 20 percent. Doomsday doesn’t seem too far away, does it?
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Amidst these depressing statistics, North Dakota is the silver lining. It currently has at least $1 billion in budget reserves and has the nation’s lowest unemployment rate at 3.3 percent. What has caused North Dakota’s economic boom? Oil.
The U.S. is the world’s largest oil consumer and the U.S. is importing an average of 1.5 billion barrels of oil a day from Saudi Arabia alone. The U.S. has presently spent a total of $493.8 billion on oil imports.
Yet, North Dakota seems to have better plans in mind in regard to oil. In 1995, North Dakota’s Bakken Shale contained 150 million barrels of oil. Today, that number is up to 24 billion. Steve Moore of the Wall Street Journal thinks that “as technology advances, recoverable oil could eventually exceed 500 billion barrels.”
Little do Americans know that, across this country, we are sitting on a total of 1.4 trillion barrels of oil. Former U.S. House Speaker and Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich states that this is equivalent to the amount of oil the world has used since the first well was dug before the Civil War. America also has 2.744 quadrillion cubic feet of natural gas.
However, the Obama administration currently seems bent on turning every American household into a “green energy household” with a roof of solar panels, a yard covered in mini-wind turbines and a garage housing a car that runs solely on algae. I don’t want to burn holes in earth’s atmosphere with of my family’s large gas guzzling SUV, but President Obama has taken the wrong path by giving a failing solar panel company $535 million while blatantly ignoring America’s natural resources.
The Obama Administration is also ignoring the fact that drilling for oil and natural gas in America could translate into $18 trillion worth of royalties to the national government over the next generation. This money could pay off our current national debt without any increase in taxes or cuts in government-funded projects.
The answer to our current economic and energy crisis is not to turn our backs on our own natural resources and scramble to find the best alternative energy option. This has resulted only in electric cars that run out of battery or catch on fire in the middle of the Interstate.
In order to prevent gas prices from climbing to infinity and beyond while still having no alternative energy plan, a better option is to put our abounding natural resources to use and research alternative energy on the side.
