One for you, 19 for me …

On Saturday, the House passed $16 billion in new taxes on oil companies, while providing billions of dollars in tax breaks and incentives for renewable energy and conservation efforts.

"We are turning to the future," announced House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

The goal, obviously, is to make it less attractive to drill or import oil, and more attractive to try and supply our energy needs with solar panels and windmills, as well as to shift millions of acres to the production of corn for ethanol (while continuing to block the import of cheap ethanol from Brazil).

Now, those who actually work in the power business point out current technologies have the benefit that operators can "turn on more generation" in times of high demand -- whereas it's harder to order the sun to shine or the wind to blow when needed.

So what will Americans do if the Democrats succeed in putting the oil companies out of business, while waiting for new alternatives to spring up magically at their command?

"There's a war going on against energy from fossil fuels," says Rep. Ralph Hall, R-Texas. "I can't understand the pure venom felt against the oil and gas industry."

Meantime, to fund a grab bag of new benefits for "working families," including "Get-Ahead" government grants and "Work Bonds" to match up to $500 in savings (no fair predicting by how much the per-family administrative costs will exceed $500), Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards called July 26 for raising the capital gains tax rate from 15 percent to 28 percent -- punishing those who try to make money by investing after-tax earnings in the American economy.

And "Edwards would take additional steps beyond raising the capital gains rate," The Wall Street Journal reports. "He'd raise taxes on private-equity and hedge-fund executives. ... He'd curb executive pensions by capping at $1 million the amount of compensation executives can defer. He'd roll back the Bush tax cuts for families earning more than $200,000 a year. And he'd 'declare war on tax havens' by empowering the IRS to investigate abuse of offshore tax breaks."

But we've actually been lucky, so far.

Democrats are currently on their best behavior, hoping to hang onto both houses of Congress and add the White House next year.

Should they achieve that, and no longer have to worry as much about nay-saying Republicans obstructing their plans, imagine the kind of fiscal revenge and punishment they'll be able to mete out against their capitalist enemies then!

Don't ask them what they want it for, if you don't want to pay some more ... 'cause they're the taxmen.