The first piece of legislation passed by the new Congress of the United States of America after the ratification of the Constitution included a tariff on the import of foreign sugar.
Articles tagged as
subsidies
Is Residential Solar Bad for the Environment?
One of my favorite Dalrymple quotes is (paraphrased) that misery will always rise to meet the government subsidies created to alleviate it. And so it is with residential solar. The number of installs near my home has exploded, as has another interesting habit.
Burgess Biopower: Upon Which I Wag a Finger at Kevin Avard and a Thanks to Chris Sununu
One of the ‘Grok mantras: Spank’em when they’re wrong and thank’em when they’re right. Generally, it’s Kevin getting the latter and Sununu the former. However, after years of elected representatives doing the Hidden Tax Tango and sending our monies to ‘burn” in the Burgess Biopower plant (whichuses low-grade wood to fuel its boilers to generate electricity), three things are clear.
Quick Thought: Not so much “free market”, eh Tom, when you want others to pay for “weeding your garden”?
So, Tom Thomson (son of Gov. Thomson of “low spending yields low taxes” fame) who for years was the honorary chair of AFP-NH which argues for Free Markets, has decided to go the Full Monty and arguing that electric rate payers (that would be you and I) should pay for his timber to be cut (e.g., override the biomass vetoes by Gov Sununu on SB 446 and SB 365 which would promulgate the over $2 Billion overcharges to keep the North Country Biomass subsidies for electrical generation plants that turn crap wood into overpriced electricity). Sure, Free Market until it comes to be “get me some” and have Government continue to institute a undeserved and mandated “tax” on the rest of us:
Tom Thomson, a timberland owner of 2,600 acres and the conservative son of former Gov. Mel Thomson, spoke at the event in favor of overriding the veto. “You have to weed your garden if you want healthy vegetables,” Thomson said. “It’s the same thing with forests.”
Hey, go weed your own dang garden, Tom, and leave my wallet alone. If you have any intellectual honesty at all, stop privatizing your profits and socializing your risk. You can’t find folks to buy your timber? Too bad – that’s the risk of being in business: reward AND failure. To paraphrase the line in your Op-Ed in the Concord Monitor:
G7 Shakedown – Trump Drops Truth Bomb About Trade. Everyone Loses Their Mind.
Mike teased Trump’s realignment at the G7 Summit here which the media has (naturally) decided to sell it as a G6 versus the Trump Ogre. The world aligning against their oafish nemesis. That tells us a lot about the media and their abhorrence of the Make America Great Again Culture that put Trump in Office.
They can’t imagine it going any other way, but it has and it will and Don Surber, in an article titled “G7 is Donald Trump and the Six Dwarfs,” adds a bit of math to help clarify the relationship.
Data Point – Data for Grid Parity for Solar PV keeps going into the future
(H/T: Business Insider)
I have said often that I am not against Solar Energy – I bought a solar hot water heater and solar hot air solar collectors (home heating). But I paid a pretty penny for them and once the subsidies dried up, so did the companies that could no longer service the companies. BI pulls from another source for this chart – Catherine Wood of AllianceBernstein:
The coming of grid parity keeps receding into the distance like a desert mirage. Over the last six years, executives at solar energy firms and their consultants have projected repeatedly that solar energy will reach grid parity—become cost competitive with other power sources—in three to five years—only to push its expected time of arrival further into the future…
…To understand the concept of grid parity, imagine you’re an electric power company executive poised to invest in new generating capacity. You can invest in any technology you want, using any kind of fuel. All you care about is whether the net cash flow from selling the electricity would provide a reasonable return on invested capital. Your first order of business would be to see what price you’d have to charge for the electricity you produce to justify the investment.
Today, you’d need to charge $375 per megawatt hour to justify investment in new solar equipment—nearly four times the average US retail price of electricity. That’s why solar energy requires steep subsidies.
The TEA Party is for America not for a Political Party
Jim Hightower’s recent article titled, “Playing politics with humanitarian aid”, (see Jim Hightower.com) is just another anti-TEA Party screed falsely attempting to link it with the Republican Party. The article can be summarized: Republicans and TEA Partiers cannot complain about Democrat wasteful and irresponsible spending which rewards Democrat supporters because Republicans similarly spend to reward Republican supporters.
The TEA Party objects, equally strenuously, to wasteful and irresponsible spending by both parties.
The TEA Party believes that politicians in Washington are only authorized to raise and spend money to pay for Constitutionally authorized functions. Politicians are not authorized to tax or borrow money to reward friends or to buy political support.