The Shaheen-Portman Energy Bill - More Bureaucracy and Taxpayer Handouts - Granite Grok

The Shaheen-Portman Energy Bill – More Bureaucracy and Taxpayer Handouts

Tax Money down the toilet for DoD green energy awardsThe Shaheen-Portman Energy Bill has stirred up some controversy about Scott Brown, Kelly Ayotte, and a he-said, she-said contrivance manufactured by the left-wing Huffington Post.  But then, that is what the left does.  It lies.

The left will do and say anything to elicit an emotional response which will create movement on their side.  Money, action, whatever.  And I could easily excrete 900 words from my finger-tips in short order on the matter but the he-said she-said contrivance is running cover for an even bigger lie; that the Shaheen Portman Energy efficiency boondoggle was a good bill that Republicans killed. It’s a lousy bill.

It is a lousy bill, with silly incentives, that rewards lazy states, prop up badly manged local budgets, and  redistributes wealth from taxpayers to big businesses and big bureaucracies, that should not be adding decimal places to the debt clock for a program that is the energy-efficiency equivalent of rearranging deck chairs on the titanic.

What exactly is so damn cost saving and efficient about this…

Janie close the fridge and turn off the kitchen light.  Please close the fridge and turn off the light.  I’d really like you to close the fridge and turn out the light.  Tell you what, I’ll pay myself  $750,000.00 dollars to train you on how to close the door and turn off the light, and here’s a few million to make sure you pretend to follow through.

I’m not kidding.  That describes Shaheen-Portman.

And yes, I read at least half of this bill.  At the approximate mid-point I had so furrowed my brow over the rank stupidity of its assumptions and premise that I went looking for research about the bill.  I found some.  I was not wrong in my conclusions.  This bill is an awards program for industry insiders, lazy local governments, and pencil pushing bureaucrats while rewarding those who have no business feeding at the taxpayer trough.

Heritage summed the problems up with a series of observations and questions.  There is also plenty of analysis, which I have linked to at the end.  I’ll post the questions, which should provide more than enough incentive for you to go looking for the details on your own.

One quick point before I shut up.  Both at work and at home, I actively pursue efficiencies that save more time or more money because I am a firm believer in optimizing yields and value–because it is my money or my paycheck that is affected when things are not efficient.  These are priorities to me, but if they were not, and I was an unscrupulous bureaucrat, legislature, US Senator, or a corporate rent-seeker, what would prevent me from playing along if I knew there was free money at the end of a dimly lit inefficiency rainbow?  Shaheen-Portman invites the latter, and could care less about the former which means that it would never do anythign more than grow government to waste even more taxpayer money for nothing.

Here are some Questions courtesy of Heritage.

Q1. Why should taxpayers foot the bill for states and Indian tribes to implement the requirements of this section and help them meet certification requirements if they fail to meet them?

Q2. Do the certification requirements and the taxpayer handouts not take away the “voluntary” aspect of this program?

Q3. Why should taxpayers subsidize worker training programs? Is that not a role for the companies that sell energyefficient products? Are these worker subsidy programs not simply handouts to the businesses that support the legislation?

Q4. What happens when taxpayers are paying for various programs and consumers still do not want to make the energy efficiency upgrades? Won’t this simply create a labor market for demand that doesn’t exist?

Q5. Haven’t programs such as this already been tried under the stimulus, and haven’t they been failures and a waste of taxpayer money?

Q6. Are these handouts not for a specific set of universities and corporate welfare for big companies? Why should enormous companies such as Dow Chemical, LyondellBasell, and Air Products and Chemicals receive taxpayer money to improve energy efficiency?

Q7. Why do businesses need governmentcreated industrial efficiency programs and manufacturing goals in the first place? Why does an Advanced Manufacturing Office even exist?

Q8. Who pays for the sustainable manufacturing initiative? Why should taxpayers pay for business assessments to identify opportunities to maximize efficiency?

Q9. Why should the Energy Department label SupplySTAR companies and products that comply with the program as the “preferred practices, companies and products in the marketplace for maximizing supply chain efficiency,” as indicated in the bill? Should those preference and choices not be made by those in the industry who use the supply chains?

Q10. Why should taxpayers subsidize rebate programs to help companies save money? If businesses are oblivious to spending money on energy costs, why should one expect another several million dollars from the taxpayer to make any difference?

Question the Role of Government

Families and businesses want to save money. Members should question why Americans need to be prodded by government mandates, rebate programs, and spending initiatives to be more energy efficient. Homeowners and business owners will make those choices on their own; when they do not, it is because they have other priorities to consider, budget constraints, and other ignored tradeoffs such as comfort, convenience, and product quality.

Here is a more brief review

Here’s one that offers some positives and negatives

And this is a more lengthy assement

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