Gems from George Will

Richard Boddie sent out George Will's latest column, "The Devils in His Details," to his email list. It's got some thought-provoking stuff:

• Russia, a Third World nation with First World missiles

• Obama has vowed to "cut investments in unproven missile defense systems." Steamboats, railroads, airplanes and vaccines were "unproven" until farsighted people made investments.

• Obama waxes indignant about approximately 150,000 jobs sent overseas each year -- less than 1 percent of the number of jobs normally lost and gained in the creative destruction of America's dynamic economy.

• Oil companies' profits in 2007 were, as a percentage of revenue (8.3 percent), below those of U.S. manufacturing generally (8.9 percent).

• One oil company, Exxon Mobil, pays almost as much in corporate taxes to various governments as the bottom 50 percent of American earners pay in income taxes.

• Exxon Mobil does make $1,400 a second in profits -- hear the sharp intakes of breath from liberals with pursed lips -- but pays $4,000 a second in taxes and $15,000 a second in operating costs.

• Obama has also promised that "we will get 1 million 150-mile-per-gallon plug-in hybrids on our roads within six years." What a tranquilizing verb "get" is. This senator, who has never run so much as a Dairy Queen, is going to get a huge, complex industry to produce, and is going to get a million consumers to buy, these cars. How? Almost certainly by federal financial incentives for both -- billions of dollars of tax subsidies for automakers and billions more to bribe customers to buy cars they otherwise would spurn.

• Where will the electricity for these million cars come from? Not nuclear power (this is part of liberalism's catechism). And not anywhere else, if Obama means this: "I will set a hard cap on all carbon emissions at a level that scientists say is necessary to curb global warming -- an 80 percent reduction by 2050."
No, he won't. Steven Hayward of the American Enterprise Institute notes that in 2050 there will be 420 million Americans -- 40 million more households. So Obama's cap would require reducing per capita carbon emissions to levels probably below even those "in colonial days when the only fuel we burned was wood."

The last two gems were from a previous George Will column, "Little Rhetoric Riding Hood."