“Eating seed corn” is a metaphor for being forced into the no-win situation of imperiling the future to survive the present. So the allusion does not quite work with contemporary America. Unlike the proverbial farmer who loses his crop to drought or pests, and thereby is forced to live on next year’s planting seed, Americans are under no such coercion. We were not forced into our dilemmas by nature, but simply by choice — and our own greed and foolishness.
As gas prices climb back toward $4 a gallon, the Obama administration — facing a tough re-election campaign and rising Middle East tensions — is once again considering tapping the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. For years, administrations have bought and stored oil for emergencies, in fear of a cutoff of imported oil, as happened during the Arab embargo of 1973-74.
But since 2009, the U.S. government has declared most federal lands off-limits to new oil and gas exploration — despite vast recent finds of energy and radically new means to tap it. President Obama also canceled the most vital sections of the Keystone pipeline, a proposed conduit from the Canadian oil fields into the heart of the oil-consuming U.S., while preventing production on existing oil and gas reserves in northern Alaska and offshore. In the midst of a crop-killing drought, we are diverting about 40 percent of our shrinking corn crop to produce high-cost ethanol fuels.
Apparently, Americans are not willing to produce enough new available oil to meet our always growing gasoline appetites. Yet to keep gas prices manageable in an election year, we will surely tap what our predecessors once banked for us.
The same shortsighted selfishness characterizes debates over entitlements and the deficit. Republicans accuse Obama of transferring more than $700 billion out of Medicare to help fund his new federal takeover of health care. Obama counters that Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget plans would either privatize or end Medicare as we know it. But either way, without revolutionary changes, Medicare’s costs will almost double in the next 10 years and bankrupt the system.
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