Wife and I were discussing Obama’s energy plan yesterday evening, and I mentioned that he wanted to drain Crude Oil out of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. She immediately went to the same place I did: “That’s like spending our emergency fund for no good reason.”

That is, of course, exactly what Obama’s plan (and a similar plan that’s been mentioned by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi) is. Beldar has more, including a vivid description of the reasons why the Reserve was created in the first place (and an explanation about why Obama’s aides’ “explanation” of his plan doesn’t really make it any less risky).

Many Americans, I fear, won’t really understand how dangerous this plan is. After all, there is a huge block of our populace who feel there is no need for an emergency fund — and, this time last year, I was one of them. These people assume that the money will keep flowing, that because they can make the payments (assuming everything remains the same), they can simply ignore the need to have anything socked away for a rainy day.

It’s my understanding that Barack Obama and his wife Michelle were exactly this sort of Americans. Despite having had the income of two Harvard-educated lawyers, Michelle has said publically that they were “struggling” until Barack’s book deal went through. Given that their incomes were probably higher than that of my wife and I (and I would not classify us as “struggling” by any means, though we’re far from rich), the only reason^[a] that I can think of that they would be struggling is that they weren’t managing their money well.

I’m not trying to denigrate the Obamas for their money management abilities — I am well known among my friends for having lousy money-management abilities — but two lawyers (especially Harvard educated lawyers, one of whom graduated magna cum laude) who are struggling to make it (and, apparently, only succeeded because one of them got a lucrative book deal) do seem to have some resource management issues.

With that in mind, it comes as no huge surprise that Obama’s “energy plan” involves burning off a portion of our reserves to get immediate relief without a backup plan^[b] to restore the reserves. Obama’s long-term solution is also reflected in his money management skills of the past — he wants to research alternate energy and hope we find a solution quickly. In other words, he’s hoping for a windfall to save us.

The rational approach here is not to ignore research into alternative energy sources, but to do such research responsibly. We should not turn our backs on energy sources that we know are available (drilling in locations where oil is available and accessible, build nuclear power plants), as those sources are going to have to carry us until our research pans out.

Still, as Obama himself has pointed out many times before, these sources are not going to pan out immediately — we need the Strategic Petroleum Reserves to get us through any rough times we may encounter before we’re ready to move away from oil completely. To suggest that we should drain them now to lower gas prices in the short term is simple irresponsibility from the Obama campaign, and is little more than a thinly disguised bid to “buy” votes.

1. Actually, I can think of a second reason — Michelle was lying about “struggling” in order to seem as though she could empathize with the average American. I’m giving her the benefit of the doubt in assuming that she was telling the truth. [↩]
2. i.e., drilling in locations where we are reasonably certain that there are accessible oil supplies [↩]