What do we learn from the debate?

Obama wants to run a "Clean Campaign."

Except he doesn't.  By refusing to repudiate any charges against McCain that were made by his supporters, he is implicitly approving every slanderous or libelous, baseless, ridiculous charge that the nutroot, netroots want to throw against McCain.  Obama doesn't care about "hurt feelings," so he couldn't care less.  McCain supporters should attack.  McCain supporters need to bring out the truth about the judgement of their not-so-wunderkind.  McCain is a chump if he repudiates anything from this point on.

Obama wants to spend the next three weeks talking about the "economy."

He wants to talk about how bad the economy has been over the past year, but not the years before when we had sustainable economic growth.  He wants to pretend it was Bush policies that brought us here, when it was Bush policies that brought us five or six years of "Goldilocks" growth (not too fast, not too slow--according to Larry Kudlow), and that it was demonstrably two democratic policies that got us into this fine mess: 

Their "don't drill" environmental energy policy:  Ten years ago, the Republican Congress passed a bill that would allow more drilling, but it was vetoed by President Clinton--oil, by the way, that we would have had access to already even by Democratic standards, since they say it will take ten years to see any new oil.  What does Barack say?  Oh, he wants to allow drilling now (at least while he has a Democratic congress and he never has to, you know, actually drill). but he still says  we have three percent of the worlds oil reserve but we use 25% of the world's oil . . .   I don't know if he intentionally left out the word production, or if it was just a debate mishap.  Of course it makes the statement totally meaningless.  The worlds oil reserve is huge.  We are talking about all of the oil underneath every Arab country, every western country, China, Russia,. . . . everywhere.  And 3% is under our country.  That is a lot.  Thirty years ago, they were talking about running out of oil.  Now they are not.  We simply cannot produce it fast enough.  And the statistic usually sited by the Democrats is that we use 25% of the worlds oil production.  But that 25% of the annual production (it needs to be annual, or it doesn't make sense--production doesn't lead to an amount of oil unless you put a time to it:  how much oil we produce in a month, a year, a day) which is a very small amount compared to the three percent of the actual reserves in the world. Imagine that he had said, we only have 3% of a million dollars, but we use 25% of a hundred dollars.  They make the 3% figure sound small (it is $30,000) and the 25% figure sound large ($25)  but it isn't.

The credit crisis:  This is even sadder that they are able to pin this on Bush.  Because it is due to all of those worthless loans clogging the credit markets.  These are loans made to people who could not afford them. The Democrats WANTED the banks to make those loans.  The Democrats PRESSURED the banks to make those loans on fear of losing their charters.  Then when the mortgages started to default because they turned out to be too creative and began adjusting, then the banks, which the dems had forced to make bad loans became "Predatory lender".  Oh, sure.  Everyone is standing in lines to make loans to people that can't pay them back.  At least in Obamaworld.  We're Obama warned about Freddie Mac and Fannie May.  Only we're never told what he warned about or what he wanted done.  Don't tell me he wanted the banks to stop making these loans.  His favored Acorn (whose parent company he defended--it was just those nasty people who they were paying for signatures who got fake signatures) is one of the prime movers in getting people into houses they can not afford.  He probably just wanted to have the government pump more money into the mortgage system earlier so banks could make even more bad loans.  Do not try to tell me that he wanted to warn them about making bad loans.  That is just not the Obama way.

Of course all of this would have come out if they had had many townhall meetings.  But that doesn't matter.  He wants to spend three weeks talking off a teleprompter and airing his (and his supporters') ads, so they can put anything they want on the air and he never has to repudiate anything.

Because he wants a "clean campaign"

They said it again:

“We can’t drill our way out of this.  We produce 25 percent of the world’s oil, but we only have 3 percent of the world’s oil reserve.”

I’ve heard this from Hillary, Pelosi, Obama and recently at the veep debate, I heard it from Biden.

It is a talking point.  It is a talking point in the sense that everybody says it.  Nobody thinks about it. It is not a thinking point.

But like all statistics, it says something very specific, but it doesn’t say what they say it says.

What does it say?

It compares our production to the world’s production.  They produce three times what we produce (25% vs. 75%)

It compares our reserves to the world’s reserve.  They have about thirty time the reserve that we do (3% vs about 90%).

All this really means is that the rest of the world has a heck of a lot of oil.  Much more than we do.

What doesn’t it say?

It doesn’t compare anybody’s production to anybody’s reserve.

It doesn’t say anything about what how much we need to become energy independent. Specifically, it doesn’t say anything about how much we would need to “drill our way out of this.”

I am not saying we can or can’t drill our way out.  But they are offering this statistic as proof that we can’t and we just can’t conclude that from this statistic.

What can we conclude?

We can conclude that we would run out of oil way before the rest of the world does.

What can we not conclude?

We don’t know from this statistic WHEN we would run out of oil. Since there is no comparison between anyone’s reserve and their production, we don’t know if we will run out in 10 years, 30 years, or 1000 years.  We can conclude that we will run out first, but if we will run out in 1000 years, knowing that we will run out first doesn’t really matter that much, does it?

We also don’t know from this statistic how much we can increase production.  Since there is no comparison between our production and our reserve, we could, conceivably,  double our production.  We might run out sooner, but since we don’t know from this statistic whether that would be in 15 years or 500 years, this statistic doesn’t preclude increasing production.

Therefore, we don’t know from this statistic whether we can drill our way out of this or not.  It doesn’t tell us by how much we can increase production and it doesn’t tell us how much we would need to increase production to drill our way out.

I am not offering statistics that say we can drill our way out.  I’m sure the numbers are out there and smarter people than me can figure this out.  But I know this statistic—this talking point—doesn’t make that case.

The next time I see this statistic in the context of a debate, I want the opponent to really take them to task.  Don’t let them get away with using this shabby statistic.  If they can prove—really prove—that we can’t drill our way out, make them prove it.

There are three kinds of liars, we are told, liars, statisticians and democrats.

How many times have you heard something like, "We can't drill our way out of this.  We have 3% of the worlds oil reserves, but we consume 25 percent of production."

Apples and oranges.

The oil reserves are much larger than the amount that is produced every year.  If this wasn't true, then the world would run out of oil within one year. In fact, since we've been drilling for a century, and expect to be drilling for quite a while longer, I would say the reserves are vastly greater than annual production.  It may even be true (it probably is) that 3% of the worlds reserves is much, much greater than 25 percent of the oil production.

This is not to say that we can drill our way out of this, but the assertion often made by the democrats is that we could only ever produce one eight of our oil consumption (3%/24%) is not supported by the statistic.  Saying that we have one thirtieth of the worlds reserves doesn't prove that we can't increase our production to 50% or 80% of our consumption.

World reserves are irrelevant.  US reserves are relevant only to the extent that they inform how much we might increase production.   The only truly relevant numbers are our consumption, our current production and how much we might be able to produce if we were able to explore on oil fields where we're currently prevented from exploring.

So until they start comparing consumption to current and potential production, we need to call them on it every single time until their apples and oranges comparison is seen as the statisticians lie that it truly is.