New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu and I agree on several things. Lowering taxes (or eliminating them) is good. Shoring up protections for the right to self-defense is critical. And refusing to fund Berlin’s Burgess Biomass boondoggle was the right thing to do.
Last week, the governor’s veto of another legislated Burgess bailout survived an attempted override. A bailout that was only made possible with Republican votes, so it wasn’t just Democrats doing us dirty. Sununu did us a favor, and the failure to override seemed likely. You only need a handful of ignorant Republicans in this legislature to promote a bad idea, but you need a lot more of them to make it stick the landing after a veto.
The override tried to vault the veto but failed to achieve the necessary height, what I’d call an example of the process working, and it has drawn a bit of ink in the media, local and national. Depending on what you think about it, you’ll agree or disagree with this take or that. But Burgess was never going to make money. It was a money pit (the rates necessary to show a profit the fiscal equivalent of gang rape). The jobs it creates destroy them elsewhere in the economy. Environmentalists don’t even like burning wood for power. Taxpayers and ratepayers would forever be bailing the thing out to pay more for their electricity.
You might as well burn money, which – given the trajectory of the Biden economy, may soon be cheaper, so – taking a hint from Grokster Ian Underwood – we’d suggest that anyone who feels that strongly about saving those jobs bail them out themselves.
Back in June, I explained how this might work. You could pay the employees to do nothing and save New Hampshire ratepayers and taxpayers millions more than trying to keep the facility online.
I don’t know what Burgess Biomass employees make or the five-score timber folks, but can we agree it’s probably less than 100,000 per year?
If we gave the Biomass folks each 60K to do nothing (which is the national income average), it would cost 1.8 million. Add the 200 timber workers, and that’s another 12 million. Paying them not to increase our electric rates would save New Hampshire ratepayers over 135 million dollars on top of the reduced cost of electricity from not having to pay higher rates.
We’d continue to save more, even if we had to extend the severance for several years, than if Sununu signed HB142.
When it costs less to subsidize inactivity, that thing you want has problems. Burgess biopower has problems.
The problem with building a business model on what amounts to a government subsidy is that one’s survival depends on favorable treatment by politicians. That’s never a good place to be.
Burgess wound up with a worse deal than it had initially anticipated. After ratepayers had been forced to pay it $100 million above market rates for electricity, any future payments above the market price had to be refunded. It hit that cap years earlier than expected, thanks to technological advances that lowered the price of natural gas. It then exceeded the cap, necessitating repayments to ratepayers, which it could hardly afford.
We can probably agree that Democrats, by majority, are the more enthusiastic advocates for bailing out Burgess (along with Market Meddling Republican NH Senators Jeb Bradley and Kevin Avard – to name but two). From where I sit, neither has much trouble raising money to exercise political force to take ours. What if they just skipped the middleman and funded Burgess themselves?
It would never happen because people like that never throw “their” money down these holes. They run for elected office to use the force of law to feed these bottomless pits with the fruit of our labors. And while Burgess is in limbo today, Bradley and the Dems still have an itch in their green pants to get this done.
The Burgess Bailout will be back, and we’ll need Sununu to veto it again before he ends his service in the Governor’s Office.
HT | JBartlett