Drilling for Dollars - WSJ.com

Allowing drilling isn't the giveaway to industry that Speaker Nancy Pelosi and environmentalist dead-enders claim. In fact, liberating publicly owned resources could net the Treasury as much as $2.6 trillion in lease payments, royalties and corporate taxes, according to one estimate currently knocking around Capitol Hill. The returns wouldn't roll in overnight, but that's almost a full year of spending even for this spendthrift Congress.