Tag Archives: Solar Power

News

Is Barack Obama responsible for rising gas prices?

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Here’s an article that takes a look at the effects of his energy policies. (H/T Ari)

Excerpt:

With gasoline currently above $3 per gallon nationwide and economists expecting that price to rise even further in 2011, America should be getting serious about producing more of its own resources. But instead of focusing on how to bring more relief to American motorists, President Obama has imposed massive new regulations, restrictions, and even threatened higher taxes on American energy, all of which negatively impact domestic production.

What follows is a list of the five most egregious actions on the part of the Obama administration that have contributed to higher gasoline prices and greater dependence on foreign dictators for our energy…

Here’s the one I thought was the most interesting:

Cancelling existing permits: Immediately after taking office in 2009, President Obama’s handpicked Secretary of the Department of Interior, Ken Salazar, canceled 77 leases for oil and gas drilling in Utah. The fact that this was one of the administration’s first regulatory decisions meant that American energy companies were immediately concerned about their ability to produce oil and gas in the future, injecting a level of uncertainty into the market that moves the country away from job creation and economic recovery. One year later, the administration canceled 61 more leases, this time in Montana, as part of President Obama’s war on global warming.

And here’s the conclusion:

Why has President Obama led the charge to restrict American energy? The answer is elusive, and it’s anyone’s guess what his administration will do (if anything) to fight for lower gasoline prices. But if past statements from him and his administration are any indication, the U.S. could be stuck (absent major legislative and regulatory changes) with prohibitively high gasoline prices: Then-Senator Obama said on the campaign trail in 2008 that he doesn’t object to high oil prices as long as they come about gradually, and Secretary of Energy Steven Chu once famously said he hoped the U.S. would “boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe,” where prices are currently about $7 per gallon.

Yes, it’s true. People on the left are willing to enact policies that cost consumers more money, reduce the number of jobs for Americans, outsource energy production to other countries, and even pay our enemies to produce energy in ways that are more damaging to the environment than our ways of producing energy. This is the Democrat way. They don’t care about you having cheaper energy prices, they don’t care about creating jobs for Americans, and they don’t care about reducing pollution. If you want to see where this is going, just look at the policies of the socialist Dalton McGuinty in Ontario, Canada.

Why do they do this? Well, people on the secular left are often stuck believing in doomsday predictions about overpopulation and resource exhaustion that were discredited years ago. Having rejected God’s sovereignty over the universe as part of their embrace of moral relativism and rejection of ultimate accountability, they look to big government to reduce the uncertainties and fears of a mindless, random universe.

If no one is in charge, then anything could happen, they think – and they are frightened. Thus, they look to government to coerce people to behave predictably, and also to reduce the total number of people (abortion, DDT bans, purges of dissenters, etc.). And of course fussing about imaginary bogeymen like global warming gives them an inflated sense of self-righteousness and justifies their nanny-state micro-managing of ignorant taxpaying businesses and workers.

These are not good people. These are not competent people.

Commentary

If Democrats understand economics, then why is unemployment so high?

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First, Nancy Pelosi thinks that the productive people should pay people not to work. (H/T Hot Air)

What’s wrong with that?

Ed Morrissey writes:

  • “This is one of the biggest stimuluses to our economy” — No, it’s a net drain on the economy, although for understandable purposes.  It reroutes capital from production to non-production.  We are paying people who aren’t working by using capital that could otherwise go to creating jobs.  It’s a policy tradeoff and understandable, although not for 99 weeks, which is what Pelosi is attempting to extend further.
  • “It injects demand into the economy” — Not at the rate in which the capital gets destroyed.  Remember, the money for this program gets confiscated from producers and passed through the government bureaucracy to non-producers.  What winds up back in the hands of producers is much less than what left their hands in the first place.
  • “It creates jobs faster than almost any other initiative” — No, it doesn’t.  In fact, it depresses job creation, which is part of the policy tradeoff.  If this was right, we’d be at zero unemployment by now.  Tax cuts, especially on capital gains, creates jobs by getting capital into the hands of job creators.
  • “It’s impossible to think of a situation where we would have a country without unemployment benefits” — That’s not actually the debate.  No one is suggesting that we eliminate all unemployment benefits.  The debate is whether we will keep extending them further.

The trouble is here is that the federal government takes a cut for themselves whenever they redistribute money from one group to another. And the government doesn’t produce jobs as well as the producers they take the money from – because government is wasteful and inefficient compared to private business.

Hillary Clinton

Here’s a post from The Right Scoop showing what Hillary Clinton thinks of producers. (H/T ECM)

She says:

It’s important, too, that we look at how to promote broadly-based prosperity. One of the problems in societies around the world today is that too much of the productivity of the economies are going to too few. Too few people, the political and economic elite, are realizing the vast majority of benefits from economic activity. It’s true in my own country where, unfortunately, economic inequality is increasing. And it’s true in Ukraine. It’s true in Europe and Asia and Africa and South America. So part of the challenge of economic growth and prosperity is to make sure it gets down and equally spread among people.

When you take money from the few, and reward the many, it also helps you to get re-elected – because you’re buying more votes. Pretty soon, you have half the population paying no federal taxes and the top half of earners paying almost all the federal taxes. Eventually, the top earners realize that they are being bled dry by the the preening wealth redistributors in government, and they scale back their production and hiring, outsource their jobs to other countries, or leave the country entirely. And that’s why unemployment is at 10%. It’s something that leftists like Pelosi and Clinton never learned – they have no concern st all about how the people they rob will respond to being robbed. And it impoverishes us all when we punish the most productive members of society. Where do you think jobs come from? The poor?

Barack Obama

The Detroit News reports on one of the reason why we all lose when government decides that they know better ways to spend money than entrepreneurs. (H/T The Blog Prof)

Excerpt:

The government is handing out nearly $2 billion for new solar plants that President Barack Obama says will create thousands of jobs and increase the use of renewable energy sources.

Obama announced the initiative in his weekly radio and online address Saturday, saying the money is part of his plan to bring new industries to the U.S.

“We’re going to keep competing aggressively to make sure the jobs and industries of the future are taking root right here in America,” Obama said.

The two companies that will receive the money from the president’s $862 billion economic stimulus are Abengoa Solar, which will build one of the world’s largest solar plants in Arizona, creating 1,600 construction jobs; and Abound Solar Manufacturing, which is building plants in Colorado and Indiana. The Obama administration says those projects will create more than 2,000 construction jobs and 1,500 permanent jobs.

That’s $1,333,333 per new permanent job.

That money could have created many more jobs in the private sector. But now it’s been wasted for politically correct solar power. And that’s why government spending prolongs recessions – it takes money away from job creators for fashionable boondoggles designed to get people elected.

UPDATE: The ONLY stimulus that counts is A JOB – or several job offers. People on unemployment are not going to spend because the future is too uncertain. What makes people spend is a current job, along with the prospect of other jobs if this one falls through. That’s what caused people to spend. You need to give tax breaks to the suppliers – suppliers stimulate demand by creating products that people actually want to buy.

News

Angela Merkel opposes spending, China stimulates solar energy production

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Story here, from the always-on-target Investors Business Daily. If you prefer a podcast, then here is your podcast.

Angela Merkel is the Chancellor of Germany. She also has a Ph.D in Physics.

First a little background:

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s idea for a “global stimulus plan” has met with resolute opposition from Germany’s leader, Angela Merkel. Good to see that common sense isn’t dead, at least in Europe.

Brown, who’ll be hosting the leaders of the G-20 nations later this week as they seek a way out of the global financial crisis, has pushed what he calls a “global New Deal” of up to $2 trillion in added spending.

But he’s had trouble selling his idea to others — to put it mildly. Czech Prime Minister and EU President Mirek Topolanek called it “a way to hell.” Even Bank of England Governor Mervyn King trashed the idea.

And then Merkel jumps on the pile:

Now comes Merkel, who, as head of the world’s third-largest economy, has probably killed Brown’s big idea.

“I will not let anyone tell me that we must spend more money,” she said over the weekend. “We must look at the causes of this crisis. It happened because we were living beyond our means. . . . We cannot repeat this mistake.”

We need to listen to Merkel, because she knows what she is talking about. She has a perspective we don’t because of Germany’s tragic history in the 20th century.

After World War I, Germany tried to spend its way out of a recession brought on in large part by the onerous war reparations.

As Weimar Germany printed money, inflation soared (in 1918, $1 bought 4.2 German marks but by 1923, $1 fetched 4.2 trillion marks) and unemployment surged.

If you want a real stimulus, try being like the communist Chinese. I blogged about their sales tax cuts on automobiles before, and about how worried they are about our deficit spending, (along with everyone else in the G20). But look what I found over on Ace of Spades HQ.

They cite an article from semiconductor.net, and here is an excerpt:

…The Chinese government alerted all silicon, ingot, wafer, cell, and panel manufactures that it intends to announced a very aggressive Solar subsidy that is equivalent to $3 USD per installed watt, in cash, as an incentive to aid the Chinese population to install solar. Currently in China non UL, non CE, and non TUV panels can be purchased for under $2 per watt…

…With the combination of lower panel prices, renewed Federal and State incentives, utility rebates, the finance freeze thawing out, and oil prices moving up, Solar is once again looking awfully attractive. When you take into consideration the increased value of your home upon a solar installation and the tremendous credits and rebates available, you can literally install solar for 20 cents on the dollar….

Why did we elect a socialist ACORN lawyer from the party that got us into to this mess in the first place?