Tag Archives: Waste

A123: another green energy company goes bankrupt after getting stimulus money

Note: Don’t forget about the debate tonight at 9 Eastern/6 Pacific. Watch out for CNN moderator bias and planted questions though!

From the Wall Street Journal.

Excerpt:

Mitt Romney just got more fodder to attack Barack Obama’s green energy programs ahead of Tuesday night’s presidential debate.

A123 Systems Inc., which was awarded a federal grant of $249 million funded by the 2009 economic-stimulus law, filed for bankruptcy protection Tuesday morning.

The company, a maker of electric vehicle batteries, received accolades from the president in September 2010. “This is important not just because of what you guys are doing at your plant, but all across America,” Mr. Obama said in a phone call timed to the opening of a battery manufacturing facility. “Because this is about the birth of an entire new industry in America — an industry that’s going to be central to the next generation of cars.”

Energy Secretary Steven Chu in 2009 said the company was “one of the success stories of a high-technology company that was funded with government funds” and “the model of what we want to happen in the future on a bigger scale.”

The Romney campaign has attacked Mr. Obama for what it says is ill-advised government spending on risky clean-energy start-ups. In last week’s vice presidential debate, Paul Ryan called the stimulus program “green pork.”

Newsbusters adds this update:

From Bloomberg’s report today:

President Barack Obama called A123 Chief Executive Officer David Vieau and then-Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm during a September 2010 event celebrating the opening of the plant in Livonia, Michigan, that the company received the U.S. grant to help build.

“This is about the birth of an entire new industry in America — an industry that’s going to be central to the next generation of cars,” Obama said in the phone call, according to a transcript provided by the White House. “When folks lift up their hoods on the cars of the future, I want them to see engines and batteries that are stamped: Made in America.”

I’m hoping that in tonight’s debate Romney reasserts that line about the $90 billion wasted on green projects and a lot of it linked to Obama campaign fundraisers.

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9 reasons why the economy is not moving “forward” under Barack Obama

From the American Enterprise Institute.

Here’s the summary of the list of 9 items:

  1. Unemployment rate
  2. Declining U.S. labor force (structural unemployment/government dependency)
  3. Labor force participation rate
  4. Unemployment/population ratio
  5. Average hourly earnings of workers
  6. GDP growth
  7. Economic competitiveness
  8. Federal debt crisis
  9. Risk of renewed recession

And here’s the detail of one that I haven’t mentioned much before on this blog:

5. Average hourly earnings were unchanged in the August jobs report, and are up just 1.7% over the past year. Not only does that match the slowest pace on record, but one you account for inflation, wages are flat to down.

The graph:

Average hourly earnings for American workers down under Obama
Average hourly earnings for workers way down under Obama

According to Forbes magazine: (H/T Gateway Pundit)

New income data from the Census Bureau reveal what a great job Barack Obama has done for the middle class as President. During his entire tenure in the oval office, median household income has declined by 7.3%.

In January, 2009, the month he entered office, median household income was $54,983. By June, 2012, it had spiraled down to $50,964. That’s a loss of $4,019 per family, the equivalent of losing a little less than one month’s income a year, every year. And on our current course that is only going to get worse not better…

[…]Three years into the Obama recovery, median family income had declined nearly 5% by June, 2012 as compared to June, 2009. That is nearly twice the decline of 2.6% that occurred during the recession from December, 2007 until June, 2009. As the Wall Street Journal summarized in its August 25-26 weekend edition, “For household income, in other words, the Obama recovery has been worse than the Bush recession.”

[…]Obama has failed the poor as well as the middle class. Last year, the Census Bureau reported more Americans in poverty than ever before in the more than 50 years that Census has been tracking poverty. Now The Huffington Post reports that the poverty rate is on track to rise to the highest level since 1965, before the War on Poverty began. A July 22 story by Hope Yen reports that when the new poverty rates are released in September, “even a 0.1 percentage point increase would put poverty at the highest level since 1965.”

Gateway Pundit adds:

Barack Obama is not just the food stamp president.
A record one in seven Americans is on food stamps today thanks to Barack Obama.

Barack Obama is also the poverty and pain president.
Under Obama, 6.4 million Americans are living below the poverty line and there is a record number of Americans living in deep poverty.

Meanwhile, Moody’s is threatening a credit downgrade:

Moody’s Investors Service said Tuesday that it would probably cut its triple-A rating on U.S. government debt by a notch unless congressional leaders can strike a budget deal in the coming months to bring down the deficit.

“If those negotiations lead to specific policies that produce a stabilization and then downward trend in the ratio of federal debt to GDP over the medium term, the rating will likely be affirmed,” Moody’s said in a press release Tuesday. “If those negotiations fail to produce such policies, however, Moody’s would expect to lower the rating, probably to Aa1.”

The threat comes after one of the other big three ratings firms, Standard & Poor’s, downgraded the U.S. last year following the brawl in Washington over the debt ceiling.

This would be the second credit downgrade – both occurred because of Obama’s Marxist policies of “spreading the wealth around” to punish job creators and their employees.

Are you better off now than you were four years ago?

The basics of education policy explained in three videos

Learn about economics that matters to you in the easiest way possible

First of three.

Second of three.

Third of three.

Awesome!

Must-see videos on education policy

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