Editor's Note:  The following is a guest piece by a fellow conservative commentator.

Like John McCain, I attended the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, but our similarities pretty much end there.

I am not the son of serial admirals. I am the son of a wartime sailor who raised a family with a single used car, a black and white TV, no air conditioner in the L.A. heat, not even a dishwasher or microwave - on an always precarious low paying job. I did not marry an heiress who could, with the stroke of a pen if she so chose, finance a Presidential campaign.

But I donated the maximum amount I could to the Senator's campaign because in my view he is the best candidate still standing, damnation by faint praise though this statement may be.

I also was never held captive in Viet Nam. Those of us lucky enough to share my fate will never know the depths of the pain and horror Senator McCain plumbed. The only thing we can know for sure is that the depth of his courage demonstrably proved to be the greater.

Our paths continued to diverge after service, with Senator McCain continuing to make a living at the federal trough and me in the private sector helping to pay for it.

Which, with a little background, leads me to my questions for John McCain.

I am self-employed. I write patents to protect inventors, the lifeblood of our innovative economy, and I'm the only lawyer in my firm, although I employ two people full time at generous salaries and five others part time. It's hard work and tricky, which is why I pay upwards of $10,000 per year in malpractice premiums even though I've never been sued in almost 20 years of practice. I work for large clients who dictate my fees. They have not dictated a raise in ten years. Maybe they should be put in charge of Congressional salaries. In any case, I've done more than my share to personally combat inflation.

Last year, I paid a total in income taxes and business taxes of around $150,000.  That's a lot of golden eggs from one middle aged goose who employs people to boot. I thank God for granting me the grace to live in a country where I can live this story, and for the opportunity to help pay for a government of that country. But as to this last blessing, I have a surfeit, courtesy of the colleagues of John McCain, who apparently believe that Providence requires more than their usual assistance in this particular matter.

Because the U.S. government appears intent on busting my butt as a way of currying favor with what they surely mistake to be an unduly socialist Almighty (who took two out of ten Commandments to forbid us from envying our neighbors' possessions and whose Son told the rich young man to give up his own possessions - not his neighbors').

I will not digress that the unelectable Obama would make matters even worse. Instead, I'd like to know what John McCain will do to ensure that I can continue to employ the people I do at the wages they receive and still keep something for my heirs.  Which will be taxed to the max unless I die before 2010 unless John McCain does something about that too.

What specifically, Senator, will you tell Congress when the Bush tax cuts expire? Do you have a cogent free market argument for allowing small business people like me to keep a little more of my inflation-eroded money, or at least a principled reluctance to allow the government to confiscate more than they already do? How does your argument dovetail with your continuing support of war funding PLUS your election year obeisance to reducing greenhouse gases that will have little environmental effect but will require enormous economic sacrifice, including higher taxes to pay for the new cult of "climate change"?

Your judgment, to the extent that it has been questioned in the past, is linked to temperamental self-righteousness. You took great offense at being one of the Keating Five, and in response hung the McCain-Feingold campaign finance rules around the neck of the First Amendment of, to borrow a phrase, the "so-called" Constitution. You took offense at the businessman Mitt Romney impertinently challenging you for the Republican nomination and in response painted an entire vibrant and vitally important part of the private sector - the pharmaceutical industry - as being the "bad guys".

You take offense at "obscene" oil company profits yet are an officer of a government that confiscates far more in taxes from every gallon than what the oil companies make from it in profit, the same government that has permitted the dollar to weaken to the extent that during the period oil has doubled in terms of the Euro it has quadrupled in terms of the dollar. Do these two facts not at least suggest to you that a chief reason for crippling gas prices is the U.S. government? Do you understand that a weak dollar and the inflation that it stokes is a matter of poor monetary policy and not necessarily poor fiscal policy? Do you know the difference between the two?

Can you not muster even a little anger on my behalf against this fecklessness that  I've been paying for and that you've been part of all of your adult life? Or is an economically oppressive government, a topic that has always been at the heart of our Republic (think Boston Tea Party) too dry to stir your emotions?

Or are you willing to master your emotions and allow your better judgment to emerge?

Either path would be salutary Senator, and I will deeply appreciate your following either one even as much as I, your comrade in arms, will always appreciate your brave service.

COPYRIGHT 2008 JOHN ROGITZ

            The Senate is currently considering a bill that would increase various taxes on gasoline by $1.50 according to minimalist estimates, and the increase could even top $5.00.  Note that does not mean that a gallon of gas will total $5.00, that means $5.00 in addition to the cost of gas as it stands right now!

            When people hear these sorts of things, I wonder if they contemplate just how much money the government receives in taxes on gas.  In 2006, more than $7.8 billion in specialized gas taxes were paid by oil companies to go along with the $90 billion that they already pay through traditional corporate income tax.  Isn’t that enough to fund about three Iraq wars simultaneously?

Currently, the Federal excise tax on gas is 18.3 cents per gallon and state excise taxes on gas average 26.8 cents per gallon.  That brings the state and Federal combined excise tax average to 45.1 cents per gallon. 

California has the highest state excise tax on gas with a 45.5 cent per gallon fee.  Only two other states even reach the 40 cent mark – New York and Connecticut.  I feel so privileged to be a Californian!

            However, that still does not account for all the taxes you indirectly pay at the pump.  According to the Americans for Tax Reform, 54 percent of the price we pay at the pump is in the form of taxes.  That large percentage is a result of direct and indirect taxes levied on every aspect of the oil industry, not just consumer-end purchases. 

The finders are taxed, the refiners are taxed, the transporters are taxed, etc.  Every middle man in the oil industry gets hit with oil taxes in addition to the income tax they already pay.  Naturally, all that cost is then passed on to the consumer.  The end result is that 54% of the total cost we pay at the pump goes to Federal and state governments. 

            Based on a $3.99 gallon of gas, if Federal and state governments were to repeal all taxes on the various levels of gasoline production and purchasing, the cost would be a manageable $1.84 per gallon!!!  Thus, out of that $3.99 gallon of gas, various governments collectively receive $2.15 of that.

            Don’t give me this business about how we need the government to maintain our roads.  I think even a fraction of the billions of tax dollars the oil industry generates every year would cover that, don’t you?

            So as if our gas prices were not outrageous enough, now Senate Democrats want to drag more money out of us at the pump.  The Democrats ramble on and on about how America is hurting right now because of the credit crunch and a slowing economy.  But at the same time, bills such as this one increase the average American’s financial burden even more.

            So what exactly does this bill, called the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act, accomplish?  It cloaks higher gas taxes in a blanket of global warming guilt by creating offices and committees to report on greenhouse gas emissions, paternalistically monitor the greenhouse gas emissions of other countries, and sets up various government accounts holding money that is to be dispersed to worthy greenhouse gas related programs.  That is just a little sampling of the many provisions contained in the Lieberman-Warner Act.

            As a more specific example, according to a summary by the library of Congress on the Lieberman-Warner Act, one of the things it does is “Establishes the Carbon Market Efficiency Board, which shall observe and report on the national GHG emission market and provide cost relief measures if it determines that the market poses significant harm to the U.S. economy.” 

That’s right people, when in doubt…more government!  More committees!  More oversight!  History proves government is sure to straighten things out.

            Amusingly enough, another aspect of the bill would allow the Federal government to disperse a derivation of those intangible little things called “carbon credits.”  It’s almost as if the Democrats are taking legislative advice from Bono now.

The carbon credits, which the bill calls “emission allowances,” would be auctioned off to the highest bidder by another new governmental agency called the Climate Change Credit Corporation.  The additional proceeds generated by the auction would then go to other global warming causes that the government deems worthy.

So the next obvious question becomes: Why?  Why do we need to raise taxes and establish all these nifty new programs?  The answer: Because Senate Democrats would rather appease the global warming cult than help their constituencies by increasing the financial burden they bear in these relatively difficult economic times.

The ultimate goal behind the bill is to further discourage gasoline consumption, thus explaining the dramatic increase in gasoline tax that has been forecasted and was indeed intended.  Some of these proposals amount to what is called “cap and trade” legislation, where a cap is set on the volume of harmful emissions and the rights to allowed emissions are distributed or traded.

I think we can all agree that we need to decrease our dependence on foreign oil, not to mention our dependence on oil in general.  Whether one believes in global warming or not, carbon dioxide does have some effect on our environment and it would also be valuable to keep oil revenues circulating within the United States.

Yet Democrats refuse to support drilling in ANWR or off the continental shelf.  Want to know what gas prices would be if we were self-sufficient in our oil production?  Right now Saudi Arabia pays $0.91 per gallon of gas and Venezuela pays a stunning $0.12 per gallon.

Even given those statistics, the Congressional majority will not allow companies to begin drilling in the most remote parts of our country.  Even polar bears rarely venture into the remote ANWR province!

So why not nuclear?  After all, France is almost completely self sufficient by generating 78% of its energy through nuclear power and Belgium satisfies 54% of its energy needs through nuclear power.

Not surprisingly, Democrats oppose the construction of more nuclear power plants in order to satisfy our energy demands, presumably because nuclear power has the word “nuclear” in it. 

The argument Democrats present to the media in order to maintain credibility is that we would be dumping harmful nuclear waste in a remote part of the Nevada desert.  After all, if they supported dumping nuclear waste in the desert, they’d lose half their campaign contributions – the contributions that come from the tree huggers and the far left wing of the Democratic party.  However, the Democrats fail to mention that the waste would be deposited deep within Yucca Mountain and that the desert above the storage area would remain pristine. 

Another weakness in the anti-nuclear argument is that no one lives in or enjoys that remote part of the Nevada desert, so no one would even be affected by where we would put the nuclear waste anyway.  Besides, that small amount of nuclear waste pales in comparison to the over 7 million tons of carbon dioxide the United States pumps into the air every year. 

Thus, our choices are either dumping a few tons of nuclear waste in a place where it will never affect anyone, or emitting millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the air for the world to breathe.  Yet Democrats still opt for the manifestly incorrect choice.  Even liberal countries like France and Belgium have enough common sense to see past the minimalistic effect that dumping a little nuclear waste would have. 

Barack Obama has made it abundantly clear that he will raise taxes if elected President.  Our current Senate majority is already trying to take more money out of our pockets in order to finance an unnecessary liberal agenda.  Imagine what would happen if we were to combine the two.