News from the liberterrain...
Four public facilities in the Dallas/Ft. Worth Metroplex will be the recipients of money coerced from Americans nationwide by their own national government and then redistributed through a process called "stimulus grants."
According to fellow Examiner Caroline Calais, the local Dallas Environmental Policy Examiner, the beneficiaries of the coerced largess are the Carroll Independent School District in Grapevine, the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, the University of Texas at Arlington, and the Grapevine-Colleyville Independent School District.
This solar panel was installed on a new home in Frisco, Texas, in
2004. Was it subsidized with your tax money for the benefit of the
new homeowner? (AP photo/Leigh T. Jimmie)
More environmental voodoo
Each public facility, we're told, will reap "around $2 million each" to install solar panels on top of their parking structures.
According to the Calais article, "UT Southwestern says that their system will generate approximately 328,999 kWh of clean energy" while these and similar projects around the state will "reduce utility costs and save tax dollars."
Beyond the issue of converting privately earned income into publicly spent "benefits" through forced redistribution there are a few other problems not addressed by the article.
1. What does "generate approximately 328,999 kWh of clean energy" actually mean? Per day? Per Month? Per Year? Total? And how long will it take for each project to recoup its initial $2 million cost before each begins to "reduce utility costs and save tax dollars?"
2. The $2 million grants are merely "a first round of federal stimulus grants." How many more $2 million rounds will there be? And what was the last government program that did not suffer from massive cost overruns?
3. Government program come with strings attached. What will these strings be and how much will they cost Metroplex citizens to comply with them?
4. Solar panels may produce "clean energy" but the production of solar panels is not clean. In October 2008, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, (echoed by an Encyclopedia Britannia blog in 2009) announced that nitrogen trifluoride (NF3), a compound used in the manufacture of solar panels, is "17,000 times more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide." The best defense solar panel enthusiasts can muster seems to be that NF3 is "a vast improvement on the gases it has replaced" (Sulfur Hexafluoride) which was 22,800 times worse than Carbon Dioxide.
5. Reduce utility costs and save tax dollars? When have your utility bills ever gone down? When has your overall tax burden ever gone down?
That's filthy lucre for clean energy.
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Comments
It is a way to be seen as "doing something", even if it is pointless and silly. Plus, since the thieves never had to spend their own money, the initial expense is not part of the equation for them.
Government is fond of claiming that the (usually wasteful and packed with unintended consequences) special interest spending it engages in not only stimulates the economy but also triggers miraculous multiplier effects. For example, it claims that for each dollar of Earned Income Tax Credit doled out to twenty million Americans, society will reap much more than the amount spent in benefits. Few, except for libertarians, challenge the assertion.
One would think that with ten trillion dollars worth of government stimulation and magical multiplier effects (MMEs)skillfully force-injected into the economy since "just say no" became an important part of the American vocabulary, that most Americans would now be residing in starter mansions equipped with indoor heated swimming pools. Instead, real wages have remained stagnant and America appears to be slipping into in the early stages of The Greatest Depression.
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