Wanna fix it? Pass the Fair Tax. The Fair Tax eliminates the income taxes and the IRS, both good things, but also institutes a sales tax on new retail items and services for sale. It has a mechanism called the "prebate" that pays each citizen enough money to pay the Fair Tax on the basic living expenses of someone making money at the poverty level. Every citizen from your favorite street person all the way up to Bill Gates gets this prebate.

Significantly, non-citizens, such as these foreigners working here, DO NOT get the prebate. That means that they will not get the monthly payment from the gov't to defray the cost of the Fair Tax for spending up to the poverty level. That means that if they want to send our dollars back to the old country, they're going to have to do it without help from us. That will make them demand more $$$ from employers here, and make the playing field a bit more level. No more taking American jobs just because you're sole claim to fame is being willing to work for peanuts.

Such policies have raised 250,000,000 people out of poverty in India and 400,000,000 people out of poverty in China. Yes, they do work. They're just not working here because they've been taxed and regulated out of the country.

Liberalism is the ideology of envy, resentment, hatred, and self hate - which you demonstrate by your "asshat company's pursuit of profits" phrase. In reality, that pursuit of profits is repeated on a personal level for every one of us. But with the company operating nearby, many local people's pursuit of profits, to get or keep themselves out of poverty, works better than if the company is NOT nearby.

They're likely to start fracking in this area. I say bring it on. If there's a minor earthquake and something cracks or moves, or maybe one of my trophies falls off a shelf and breaks, well, that's what I have insurance for...

The "ground water contamination" is, if you look at the article, from METHANE, where some water wells have had methane for decades. Its not a big deal, you can drink water with methane in it, and you only need a simple construction to vent off the dissolved gas so that it doesn't accumulate in the house and blow something up.

Methane in drinking water occurs naturally, and as a result of coal mining operations, and sometimes any sort of drilling, with or without fracking. The whole thing is yet another "Lets tear America down" pack of lies, and the sooner we buck up and quit being scared of the boogey men that are peddling this nonsense, the better off we'll all be.

You got it - these people that attack any economic activity at all are enemies of the country. Hang 'em from the lamp posts, I say. They will all have us crawling around with sub-poverty income if we let them make us afraid of absolutely everything that involves turning a wrench or drilling a hole...

The politics of jealousy once again, as someone is upset that a CEO somewhere is getting >1M in salary, but fail to realize that the "industry profits" go to making more and more industry, which employs more and more people, sometimes in some fairly good jobs if there's competition locally to make labor scarce. Go to the Bakken and get a job in the oil fields, and make 6 figures while making an oil drilling rig go or driving a truck. "Industry profits', and only industry profits can bring back prosperity to America. The gov't can't do it, other than getting the H out of the way of industry so that THEY can do it. The gov't doesn't create wealth, industry does that. There's only 3 ways of creating wealth - wealth being something tangible that you didn't have before - and they are mining, manufacturing, and agriculture. Drilling is mining. We should be trying to get MORE of these 3 things into the USA, not less. And if there's a price to pay, then get on with it and build your buildings to withstand the "minor" earthquakes that sometimes occur, and buy insurance.

Fracking causes "minor" earthquakes, quarrying produces local ground shaking, and you're getting jobs and economic prosperity back in return. Suck it up, cupcake, or otherwise they'll start putting up a bunch of regulations that will stop the whole thing, and then we can all go to the poor house together 'cuz there won't be ANYTHING in the country that someone can't yowl about and get stopped.

Poverty causes death, plain and simple. Kill another industry, and you're killing people, plain and simple. Right now, 1/6th of the USA struggles with hunger. Some don't survive it, 'cuz if they don't starve to death, then they get sick, can't afford doctors, and die that way. Good grief, this is supposed to be the "Land of Plenty" but we've driven jobs out of the country with income taxes that make industry unprofitable and now we want to regulate the rest of the industry that can't be shipped to China into inactivity as well.

Starve, then. I've got mine - retired with a lifetime $$$ stream, but you're making the USA a worse place to live if you go around making everything more expensive or impossible to do inside our borders.

I have a hobby that requires travel around the USA, and I've finally sworn off airplane travel due to gov't abuses such as x-raying passengers and groping passengers. They can all go take a flying F, I'm driving... That puts miles on the car. The rest of the year will see trips from Virginia to Indianapolis, La Crosse, Chattanooga, and a 3-week trip visiting Los Angeles, then Kansas, then Tucson. Lots of driving. Love driving long distances, too. Won the 1987 1-Lap of America, 9,000 miles in 10 days. That was awesome.

"I get around" - The Beach Boys

Its a big country. We end up driving 100's of 1000's of miles in a relatively short time. I've owned my 2012 Subaru WRX for about 27 months. Its got 87,000 miles on it. It burns premium, and premium is pricey at around $3.75 / gallon. Yeah, that's not much compared to Europe, but Europe is smaller than the USA and their compactness also allows for cheaper public transport so they don't have to drive so much. Passenger railways can actually make money there, whereas they mostly lose money here unless you're talking about the Northeast Corridor and some of California. Rocketing across the great plains where population density is extremely low means no riders wish to get on or off there, so a train making that trip will probably not be able to get enough money in fares to operate.

CO2 isn't a pollutant. It is a made-up scarecrow by the left who want to use the issue to acquire political power.

Some numbers for the green power electric transportation dreamers:

14 million barrels of petroleum per day of transportation petroleum. Each barrel has 5.8 million BTUs of energy. Multiplying, that is 81.2 million million BTUs. Internal combustion engines are about 25% efficient, so the USA requires energy of "only" 20.3 million million BTUs per day. Since electric motors as used in electric cars are about 90% efficient, that means we require 22.5 million million BTUs per day. But battery charging is also about 90% efficient, so we then need 25 million million BTUs per day. Then, unless we're charging the batteries right at the power plant, we have to figure in the 93% efficiency of the power grid, so we really need 26.9 million million BTUs per day. There are 3413 BTUs per KwH as a conversion factor, so we need 7.88 billion KwH per day. Since there are 24 hours in a day, we need a generating capacity of 328,000 megawatts. The Palo Verde nuclear plant in Arizona can generate at a rate of 3810 megawatts. Dividing, we find that we need about 86 new nuclear power generating plants the size of our largest one to power US transportation completely and completely green.

Wind? Biggest wind machine so far is 8 megawatts, so we'd need 41,000 of them, but probably, for a fudge factor for the times that the wind doesn't blow sufficiently for 8 megawatts, we'd probably want maybe 4 times that many, or 164,000 really big wind turbines. There are 3,794,083 square miles in all of the USA so there would be a density of 0.043 wind turbines per square mile, but of course not all areas have wind or can be built (mountains), so maybe we'd get to needing 1 square mile per turbine. Doable, but how much would it cost? Read on internet 1.6 - 2.2 million per megawatt, so the large 8 megawatt turbine would be $17.6 million on the high end, and 164,000 of them would be $2.88 trillion. Build 'em out over 50 years or so and yeah, that's "only" 57.7 billion dollars per year. Chicken feed for a gov't that is already broke, eh? In contrast, the Palo Verde Nuke plant cost $5.9 billion, so 86 of 'em would cost $507.4 billion - lots less than $2.88 trillion for wind.

Solar only produces during the daytime. Not going to try to calc that.

Chicago - gave us our first truly anti-American President.

They need a full-up, C3PO level of intelligence for the driverless car. Probably 50 years... if ever...

Yeah, and wait 'til I open up with a 1000 watt mobile radio that is my ham radio station, right beside the self-driving car, that is then jammed by the high power RF field and does an immediate right turn over the cliff and into the river below. Enjoy your self-driving car, and take swimming lessons.

...are already computerized. The old '98 Jeep has a "check engine" light that has been on for about 6 years that says the oxygen sensor is out, but that was replaced 3 times and the light still keeps coming back on. Obviously, its the frappin' engine computer. No, I'm not replacing a computer, prolly $1200 - dunno, haven't looked - when I can just ignore the frappin' light.

The other car has had numerous failures connected to the computer, from the bad brake light switch that caused a "check engine" light that also disables the cruise control, and other failures that have also disabled the cruise control. The car has a "hill holder" function to prevent rollback and a stability control function that prevents skids which neither work because a "steering wheel angle sensor" is "throwing codes" and disabling those 2 functions. It doesn't disable the cruise control, so I can ignore it, although two warning lights on the dash are on permanently now, because I'm not spending $700 to have the steering column totally torn apart to replace that sensor (that may be a bad computer anyway, just like the Jeep), when I know how to do both of those functions all by myself anyway.

Self-driving car? They better have 3 computers in a "voting" arrangement and prohibit maintenance to them by anyone not having a college electrical engineering degree. These things may kill more than they save if you get Billy-Bob under the hood and stripping wires and putting them back together with black plastic electrical tape which will weather and fall off and then that wire shorts...