We, the citizens of the United States of America, call upon those seeking to represent us in public office to sign the Contract from America and by doing so commit to support each of its agenda items and advocate on behalf of individual liberty, limited government, and economic freedom.
1. Protect the Constitution
2. Reject Cap & Trade
3. Demand a Balanced Budget
4. Enact Fundamental Tax Reform
5. Restore Fiscal Responsibility & Constitutionally Limited Government in Washington
6. End Runaway Government Spending
7. Defund, Repeal, & Replace Government-run Health Care
8. Pass an ‘All-of-the-Above” Energy Policy
9. Stop the Pork
10. Stop the Tax Hikes
On April 15th, hundreds of local Tea Party and limited government groups around the country will join together to announce the launch of the “Contract from America,” a grassroots legislative blueprint for 2010 and beyond. Originally proposed by Ryan Hecker, a Houston Tea Party activist and National Coordinator for the initiative’s chief organizing group Tea Party Patriots, this project is intended to present a different kind of agenda for our federal lawmakers: unlike the Contract with America introduced in the 1990s, everyday citizens proposed and voted on every plank of the Contract from America.
Affordable energy is literally fundamental to prosperity. High energy prices always contribute to economic slowdown. The whole point of cap-and-trade and other such schemes is to raise energy prices to discourage the use of fossil fuels. They therefore will have a significant negative effect on the economy. The European Union’s weak cap-and-trade scheme has cost European consumers over $130 billion since 2005, but has not yet contributed to any reduction in emissions. Analysis of various cap-and-trade schemes suggest that they will do little to avoid rising temperatures without China and other nations following suit, which they have consistently refused to agree to.
Cap and trade also has a significant regional effect, imposing new costs on states that produce and use energy intensively (for example, in manufacturing), while rewarding states that use less energy intensively (for example, by being service industry-based). This will essentially translate into a wealth transfer from interior states to coastal states.
Congressional efforts to introduce cap-and-trade schemes should therefore be opposed. Heavy-handed regulation by the EPA would also have the same, or worse, effect. Congress has the power to stop EPA imposing such harmful regulations and should do so.
~ Iain Murray, Competitive Enterprise Institute
Energy is the stuff of life. With it, we can accomplish practically anything; we grow food, make necessities, provide warmth and shelter and comfort, education and entertainment. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) estimates U.S. supplies at 117 billion barrels of oil and 651 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, on shore and off. This is enough oil to replace entirely our OPEC imports for more than 50 years, and enough natural gas to supply all U.S. needs for more than 30 years. That’s not counting our even more vast supplies of coal, counting in the centuries. We must no longer deny ourselves access to our most productive and affordable energy types.
The BLM found that 60 percent of the onshore federal lands with potentially significant domestic amounts of natural gas and crude are politically inaccessible. We as a nation are sitting on vast deposits of oil and natural gas that we could be using to reduce our imports. Increasingly, our coal reserves are subject to similar political constraints, even as we pour billions into clean coal technologies.
~ Tom Tanton, Pacific Research Institute
