You know that $700 billion that John McCain and Barack Obama say we’re sending to “tyrants and dictators” because of our dependence on foreign oil? It doesn’t exist. In fact, it appears that Boone Pickens made it up.
I only know this thanks to the A.P.’s H. Josef Hebert, who just did a tremendous piece on the mythology behind the $700 billion number. Pickens seems to have come up with the number by simply multiplying the number of barrels of petroleum products we import every year by $145, which happens to be oil’s peak price this year (and it’s peak price of all time, for that matter).
The actual amount we send to our “enemies” for oil is more likely less than $100 billion. Click on the link to learn why.
Maybe they were including some of the money we send to buy weapons and training and “intelligence” for and against those countries. I read that some of it is called foreign aid.
Isn’t our defense budget $700 billion a year? And then there are the CIA, the DOE, and many others.