Vote Jobs

Less than 4 days are left to mark and turn in your ballots. I like to carry mine down to the drop box and others will drop them in the mail. If by mail, be sure to have them at the Post Office early enough to make sure they are postmarked before the Tuesday 8 PM deadline.

Tim Likeness, our elections manager says, “The biggest issue we tend to have is that we have so many that get postmarked the day after” going on to add that about 600 ballots were received with a postmark too late to be counted in the recent primary election.

We have a lot of candidates running in this mid-term election and several initiatives to sort out, all of which are just as important as getting our ballots in on time. We have heard all of the Democrat vs. Republican rhetoric and barbs thrown back and forth and now must decide who and what we want.

Hard core Democrats, like their Republican counterparts will undoubtedly vote party line as usual and as usual, the actual selection will be left in the hands of Independents, the center of our population that adheres to neither party down the line.

Our country is in deep trouble with a lingering recession and no viable solutions on the table just yet. Unemployment remains higher than it has been in several decades with benefits running out and so few actual jobs being offered.

That’s why for me, I’m looking to vote for where the jobs will be created.

I don’t buy the rhetoric from any candidate that they will work to create jobs. I don’t really want government creating jobs because all too often, they just expand government or transfer welfare roles, giving us more of bloated bureaucracy.

Hollow promises of “getting the government out of the way” doesn’t set well with me either, unless accompanied with sound ideas on how and where.

For some time now I have been bringing up how job creation is being blocked or impeded by government regulations and taxes being imposed upon the Energy Producers in America, while we continue to import unsustainable amounts of foreign energy resources, while we leave our own languishing in the ground.

See Missing The Boat On Job Creation and What About Jobs Obama? Unblock The Jobs!

Here we are a year later and not much has changed, other than we have the pending elections and an opportunity to select people who will see that there are hundreds of thousands of jobs just waiting to be filled in the Energy Industry, not to mention so many more in supportive industry.

Opportunistic politicians have used the recent Horizon Deepwater tragedy in the Gulf of Mexico to push for more restrictive legislation and impose further taxes on the industry that stands to begin pulling us out of this mess. From a post on the Energy Tomorrow blogsite, provided by the American Petroleum Institute we read

* A September, Rasmussen poll found that 63 percent of voters continue to support both offshore and deepwater drilling.
* A Harris Interactive survey from that same month showed that more than 60 percent opposed increasing oil and natural gas industry taxes.

Before you rush in here to cry I advocate removing all regulation and taxation, be assured that is not the case. What I do advocate is reasonable taxes and regulation with a balance of job creation for economic recovery in mind.

That is one of the problems we currently face that has thrown us so far off center and deep into this recession, we are out of balance between government control and the people.

One such out of balance position is the effort to take away from our food supply to provide energy while we have billions of barrels of untapped resources just sitting in the ground, untapped and not being used.

Washington State retiring congressman Brian Baird, in a recent Wall Street Journal interview said, “With cap and trade we wound up with a bill that didn't accomplish much, was enormously complicated and expensive.”

Yet, he is one of the politicians that joins in blocking recovering and using more of our own resources and supporting legislation such as the “was enormously complicated and expensive” cap & trade bill “that didn't accomplish much.”

While he does advocate giving tax breaks to the so-called “renewable green energy” plans, they remain more expensive, less reliable and produce much less energy for the cost as we gain from petroleum resources.

Oh, and they also require massive influx of our tax dollars to sustain them as well.

In the meantime, the very same politicians who vote to make you and I dependent upon those sources, block efforts to construct them where they reside, such as the Calico solar farm in California’s Mojave Desert and their efforts blocking wind farms.

This election is critical for our nation. As important as it is to get your ballots filled out and turned in before the deadline, researching where the candidates actually stand on issues as important as our energy policy is crucial.

We either keep going as we are, hoping to someday come out of this mess.

Or, we begin working our way out of it.

Choose wisely, my friends. The future depends on it.

I’m voting for jobs.