KILLING TWO (OILY) BIRDS WITH ONE STONE

So, how do we deal with BP's gulf oil mess?

Well, for starters, Tea Party people should stop reading now because they won't like this any more than they like facing any other fact.

That said, the answer is simple and it will kill two birds (so to speak) with one stone.

Congress must enact a new tax on all oil-drilling companies. NOW!

One percent of the value of all oil taken from public lands should more than do the trick.

That money should then be sent to the Department of Labor and used to to hire, train, relocate and house upwards of one million currently unemployed Americans from across the country to handle the cleanup efforts in Louisiana, Mississippi, Florida and any and everywhere else this mess goes!

Yes, it is shades of Franklin Roosevelt's depression era jobs programs but there is one essential difference. The money to fix the problem will come from the people who caused the problem, not from the American taxpayer!

Congressional oversight will need to be in place to keep the oil companies from trying to hike prices to offset this new tax, but right now oil companies ain't exactly the darlings of the American public, so that oversight should be relatively easy, politically.

More to the point, putting one million unemployed Americans back to work will finally put the nation's economy on solid footing!

Big oil is responsible for this mess and big oil should pay to fix it.

This time it was BP. Last time it was Exxon-Mobil. Nonetheless, all the oil-drilling companies benefit from off-shore and public land drilling and are making billions in profits.

It's time some of those billions went to getting America working and to cleaning up this environmental disaster.