At $130 a barrel, the real cost, the hidden cost, of Democrats' refusal to open up the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) and the oil resources off our coasts is 10 million jobs.

Ten million jobs for middle-class, working-class Americans that are being "outsourced" to OPEC daily, even as the Senate debates bizarrely complex "carbon cap and trade" legislation that would charge American businesses that produce carbon emissions (most of them) for the right to stay in business, then let those that reduce their carbon emissions sell or "trade" their carbon credits to other businesses that need to grow, but will use more energy as they do. The effect of this fiasco will be to impose a new tax on all businesses, and on all business growth, which will stunt business growth, economic growth, personal income growth, job growth, and tax receipts.

The climate has been changing as long as there has been a climate. It's not our fault, and we can't stop it.

But I digress.

Currently, the US imports roughly 25% of its oil, 5.4 million barrels a day, from OPEC, mostly from Saudi Arabia, Iran, Venezuela, Nigeria. At $130 a barrel, we are exporting over $700 million dollars a day to OPEC. $1.4 billion every two days. $256 billion a year. That's more than one-third of the US trade deficit of $720 billion. And that's why the value of the US dollar is falling. Not the only reason, but a big reason.

For twenty years, Environmentalists, Democrats, and a few misguided Republicans have been busy keeping Big Oil out of ANWR and out of the oil fields on the Coastal Shelves, where there are an estimated 635 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, enough to heat 60 million American homes for a century, and 115 billion barrels of oil, enough to replace 100% of the oil we now buy from OPEC for 21 years. At $130 a barrel, that would cut our trade deficit by $5.4 trillion over 21 years.

Yes, $5.4 trillion. Enough to pay the entire Federal budget for nearly two years.

Critics say that opening up 2,000 acres of the 19,049,236 acre Alaska National Wildlife Refuge for oil production would do little to bring down the price of gas, and that may be so. But it would add jobs, by the millions, to the US economy. With an estimated 10 billion barrels, ANWR could produce 1 million barrels a day for thirty years. At $130 a barrel, that's $130 million a day. $47 billion a year.

A million dollars creates 40 jobs at at average pay of $50,000 a year. $130 million creates 5,200 jobs at $50,000 a year. $47 billion creates 1,880,000 new jobs for American workers at $50,000 a year. At current oil prices, by keeping ANWR off limits, Democrats reduce employment for the middle-class, working-class Americans they pretend to care about by 1,880,000 jobs. And that's enough jobs to cut the unemployment rate from 5% to 4%.

But what if we open up the Coastal Shelves for oil production, too? And produce 5.4 million barrels a day, to replace all the oil we buy from OPEC?

That would re-invest the $256 billion a year we now deport to OPEC back into the US economy. And that would fund 10,152,000 new jobs for working-class Americans, jobs that pay an average of $50,000 a year. And that's enough new jobs to reduce the unemployment rate, in theory, from 5% to 0%. Zero. And that is the high cost of keeping ANWR "pristine." We can lay the blame for 100% of America's unemployment at the feet of the Democrats and Environmentalists who keep ANWR and the coastal oil reserves off limits.

Put another way, every year that we continue buying 5.4 million barrels of oil a day from OPEC, we "outsource" more than ten million American jobs to OPEC. If Democrats really cared about working-class Americans, they would be rushing to open up ANWR and other oil and gas reserves on Federal lands as quickly as possible to create ten million new jobs, revalue the falling dollar, stimulate the economy, and write a declaration of independence from OPEC.

But, they don't.