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November 17, 2014 at 8:23 pm #816160
wakefloodParticipantSo, as we all know, Solyndra has become a meme, like Benghazi!! – in this case, standing in for gov’t intervention in the free market and wasting taxpayer money.
Well, as one would expect, the story is different on a number of levels. The first of which being that all investment is risky and nobody picks 100% winners. But since funding potential breakthroughs in renewable energy self-sufficiency is apparently too much work for the fossil fuel industry to do whilst they pull record profits burning dirt – here’s some stuff you probably didn’t know:
“The question is not whether the Department of Energy has made some bad loans — if it hasn’t, it’s not taking enough risks. It’s whether it has a pattern of bad loans. And the answer, it turns out, is no. Last week the department revealed that the program that included Solyndra is, in fact, on track to return profits of $5 BILLION or more.”
“The moral of these stories is not that the government is always right and always succeeds. Of course there are bad decisions and bad programs. But modern American political discourse is dominated by cheap cynicism about public policy, a free-floating contempt for any and all efforts to improve our lives. And this cheap cynicism is completely unjustified. It’s true that government-hating politicians can sometimes turn their predictions of failure into self-fulfilling prophecies, but when leaders want to make government work, they can.
And let’s be clear: The government policies we’re talking about here are hugely important. We need serious public health policy, not fear-mongering, to contain infectious disease. We need government action to promote renewable energy and fight climate change. Government programs are the only realistic answer for tens of millions of Americans who would otherwise be denied essential health care.
Conservatives want you to believe that while the goals of public programs on health, energy and more may be laudable, experience shows that such programs are doomed to failure. Don’t believe them. Yes, sometimes government officials, being human, get things wrong. But we’re actually surrounded by examples of government success, which they don’t want you to notice.”
November 17, 2014 at 10:29 pm #819563
skeeterParticipant“We’re actually surrounded by examples of government success, which they don’t want you to notice.”
These programs are just peanuts. A few billion here. A few billion there.
The government program I’m most interested in is the success (or failure) of our war on poverty. We have spent $22 trillion in the past 50 years. Yet we’ve been unable to reduce poverty. Either we’re not spending enough money on poverty or we’re spending money the wrong way. A brilliant mind like Wake’s is needed to put this into perspective.
http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2014/09/the-war-on-poverty-after-50-years
November 17, 2014 at 11:14 pm #819564
wakefloodParticipantSkeets, although I haven’t yet read the Heritage Foundation report you linked (I’ll get to it!), the answer is likely both. And even though I want to respect the data posted in the report, the Heritage Foundation has an infamous history of deriving “interesting” outcomes from data sets. (Example: $22 trillion is a big number. I’d like to see how that was generated. I have no doubt it’s in the trillions, but let’s see if we can vet that?)
Having said that, I’m not going to tell you that money hasn’t been wasted, because I know that plenty has – and even $1 of waste feels bad to the taxpayers. But it’s also the case (as I said in another recent thread), that while I’m positive that those funds weren’t anything close to 100% effective in their application, I feel VERY confident of a few things:
1. Tens/hundreds of thousands of lives would have been worse off than they were due to those $ being spent. Children clothed, fed and educated. Some with mothers at home to read to their kids instead of working a second shift someplace for a few $/hr.
2. Any money put into the hands (bellies) of people living on the edge gets immediately plowed back into the hands of the McDonald’s and Walmart’s of the world. This multiplier effect is important for the economy at large and is far more effective than funneling it up to folks who already have more than they can ever spend and adds zero value to the citizens of the country – save for the handful of relatives of these people and their yacht architects.
3. In America, when we wage “wars” on societal ills, we do it poorly. We address symptoms and not causes. Why? Because to address the cause we’d have to take a really hard and damn close look at ourselves and we aren’t particularly good at that. Especially now that shame is a dirty word. Think about this for a second.
Edward R. Murrow went on TV to show injustices up close and shamed us into things like taking up the mantle of the poor in the richest country the world has ever seen. We’re in essentially the same place now with homeless and poverty as we were in 1964.
This is about an America that has lost the capacity for critical thinking and addressing issues below the band aid level. Head start. Food stamps. Education. Healthcare.
It hasn’t been “We the People” in 50yrs.
And if you want me to summarize how I feel about the underlying causes, I’d suggest that the extreme inequality that we have now is doing nothing good for both our underclass’s opportunities to step up NOR is it positively affecting our psyche. How many resume’s sent without a call does it take to deflate your ego to the point where you don’t think you deserve a decent job? How many bowls of Mac N’ Cheese does it take before your system just yells, “STOP!”?
There’s probably very few pure victims – heck, we all have to take responsibility for a good portion of our lives – but conversely, there’s also likely very few pure villians. Desperate people do desperate things. And America has set the stage to create a lot of desperation.
November 17, 2014 at 11:26 pm #819565
wakefloodParticipantAnd on the point of America not being particularly good at introspection and cause analysis, we can look around at nations who have been much better at addressing this issue than us. Here’s just one example: College tuition. We’re now in the process of making the economic bar to college so high that most can’t make it pencil or if they do, it saddles them with insupportable debt. IS THAT GOING TO MAKE THIS ISSUE ANY BETTER???
The current dynamic is so xenophobic now that you couldn’t implement anything significant from outside our bubble now if it dropped gift wrapped into our laps.
November 17, 2014 at 11:37 pm #819566
wakefloodParticipantAnd I’ll add one last factor that’s tied to the inequality issue.
Americans have been in an economic standstill for 40yrs. now. Wages are flat and falling in real terms even for folks with decent educations and motivation. And yet our per capita productivity has been the envy of the world for most of that time.
And yet, here we sit. Millions of people have dropped from actually BEING middle class to “I play one on TV”. Tons of debt. No retirements to speak of, etc.
Many of those people are now doing jobs that those folks working their way up the ladder have to compete with. White guy with some college, maybe a degree making $13/hr. in a job that decades ago was being done by a minority kid with a high school diploma.
The tide rose but it was just a storm surge for the guys with super yachts. The rest just got swept back out to sea with the debris…
November 17, 2014 at 11:57 pm #819567
wakefloodParticipantNot sure if anyone else saw/heard this quote from last spring:
“When it comes to getting an education, too many of our young people just can’t be bothered. They are sitting on couches for hours playing video games, watching TV instead of dreaming of being a teacher or lawyer or business leader. They are fantasizing about being a baller or a rapper.”
Rand Paul? Bill O’Reilly? Glenn Beck?
Nope.
Michelle O’Bama
Some thought it a put down. I suspect that in context it was an attempt to recognize that if you succumb to the hopelessness of “winning the lottery” versus doing your best at something you have a chance to actually BE, then you’ve already lost.
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