Politics & Power Quote by Dan Lipinski

Lipinski’s line is a classic piece of Washington persuasion: it turns an energy-policy argument into a national-security and pocketbook problem, then lets the listener supply the urgency. “Right now” manufactures immediacy, a signal that delay is itself a cost. “Too much” is elastic on purpose; it conveys waste without committing to a number that opponents can swat down. The real payload sits in the causal chain: America isn’t just buying oil, it’s buying “situations” - crises, military entanglements, diplomatic compromises, price shocks - that demand “time and resources.” The phrasing quietly laundered a controversial idea (that foreign policy is distorted by oil) into a commonsense accounting complaint.

The subtext is triangulation. By blaming “dependence” rather than any particular administration, Lipinski positions energy reform as bipartisan housekeeping. By pointing to “unstable countries,” he activates a post-9/11 map of threat without naming enemies, keeping the frame broad enough to include the Middle East, Venezuela, Russia, whoever fits the week’s news cycle. It’s also a subtle moral reallocation: domestic investment (efficiency, alternatives, infrastructure) becomes not idealism but prudence, because the alternative is paying twice - once at the pump, and again in geopolitical cleanup.

Context matters: as a centrist Democrat from Illinois, Lipinski often spoke in the register of industrial pragmatism. This sentence doesn’t preach climate; it sells resilience. The cleverness is that it makes energy independence feel less like a slogan and more like an overdue bill America keeps covering.