Green Economics and 'Reducing Spending in the Tax Code'

By all means, let us pursue the president’s new approach to the budget, the Orwellian ‘reduce spending in the tax code’. But, wherever will we find good examples of wasteful ‘spending in the tax code’?

Hey, look here! The Feds are taking your money to create 1,000 jobs! Of course, these jobs wouldn’t exist without this wealth transfer, and are mostly temporary anyway. But, still, it’s only $2 million per temporary job. Guess we’ll make the cost up in volume.

And T. Boone only wants a billion dollars. Then he promises to quit. Really. He’ll be the first.

The Nation also joins in:

[T]he primary problem facing clean alternative energy is the ‘price gap’–they are still more expensive than fossil fuels. As I’ve outlined in these pages previously (see “The Big Green Buy“), economies of scale, along with subsidies and planning, will help close this price gap. Only when clean technologies–like wind, solar, hydropower and electric vehicles–are cheaper than other options will global capitalism make the switch away from fossil fuels.

Of course, the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind mostly doesn’t blow so windmills and solar panels require massive redundancy as well as enormous swathes of land, and wind- and solar-powered electricity are just as old as the coal-fired variety, just practical losers. Those are possibly greater challenges than a mere ‘price gap’, and indeed they make this idea of comparing renewables with hydrocarbons as if they were apples to apples endearingly absurd.

But, anyway. While ‘planning’ is euphemistic for preferences and mandates, here you also see green econ 101 amid the author’s ostentatious advertisement of having escaped brushing up on the actual experience and history of these boondoggles.

That is, uneconomic and more expensive ‘clean’ technology becomes less expensive with subsidies (which cannot continue without breaking us, just as Spain’s almost broke them; that is, they’re ‘unsustainable’).

This requires you to come to grips with the new reality, that not only is not taking more money from you in taxes called ‘spending in the tax code’, but the money that is taken from you in taxes today to pay the subsidies, and tomorrow to pay down the debt incurred for today’s skyrocketing subsidies, well, that’s not really money taken from you, at all.

It went to government. Which gives it to someone else to somewhat lower the cost to you of that someone else’s stuff which also will be ‘planned’ because, well, otherwise you wouldn’t buy it at all!

This new ‘green economy’ will make millionaires of us all! Have some more free ice cream, it’s on T. Boone and The Nation.

Were all of this not stupid enough, particularly now of all times, here comes this latest idiocy you’ll soon be paying for despite sitting on the world’s largest energy resources (the kind that work, that is). And to think the greens’ and Obama’s Navy oppose drilling offshore on the grounds that the odd rig out there would get in the Navy’s way (really; but apparently not covering the entire Atlantic seaboard with 1,800 miles of windmills).

It seemed amusing at the time, when these black hole phony industries responded to the economic downturn by pivoting out of desperation to claim they were actually the way out of this mess. They really had no other option, as a broke country starts looking for the low-hanging waste to jettison first (see Spain, supra …which found itself in the Gambler’s Dilemma, having made their banking sector vulnerable to collapse, as well, if the government let the bubble fully burst).

But at the time I assumed that even Washington wasn’t that dense to fall for it.