Posted by Jack
How's your memory?
Does anybody out there have any memory of the reason given for the establishment of the DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY during the Carter Administration?
Anybody? Anything? No? Didn't think so!
Bottom line ... we've spent several hundred billion dollars in support of an agency ... the reason for which not one person who reads this can remember. Ready??????? It was very simple .. and at the time everybody thought it very appropriate...
The 'Department of Energy' was instituted on 8-04-1977 TO LESSEN OUR DEPENDENCE ON FOREIGN OIL! How are they doing?????
AND NOW IT'S 2009, 32 YEARS LATER ... AND THE BUDGET FOR THIS SO-CALLED NECESSARY DEPARTMENT IS AT $24.2 BILLION A YEAR. IT HAS 16,000 FEDERAL EMPLOYEES AND APPROXIMATELY 100,000 CONTRACT EMPLOYEES AND LOOK AT THE JOB IT HAS DONE! THIS IS WHERE YOU SLAP YOUR FOREHEAD AND SAY 'WHAT WAS I THINKING?'
Ah, yes, good old bureaucracy... And NOW _ we are going to turn the Banking System, Health Care & the Auto Industry over to government?
Are you really making the citizens' obscenely short attention span out to be a sensible reason to do anything? Anything at all?
And it was those lovely long lines at the pumps that lead to the creation of the U.S. Department of Energy, that is supposed to develope energy strategy and subsidies for the development of new technologies: like all those wind farms, mirror farms and whatnot you also complain about. They been doing their job. But there is just no pleasing you people.
So Libby, are you telling that none of what you claim are things like wind farms or solar farms could have been accomplished without this mega-bureaucracy? And that all the money dumped into the Dept. of Energy has really helped us somehow?
I'm not sure anyone will believe that, but nice try.
Absolutely, I'm telling you that. Not even the current calamity has broken the American investor community of its: "I gotta have 8%, and I gotta have it now!" Damn near all the serious R&D conducted over the last 40 years has been funded by the gov.
It was at the University of Delaware, a public institution, that carbonized chicken down is discovered to be gonna make hydrogen fuel cell cars damn near affordable. Twenty years from now, we could be filling up with water. GM did not do this, GM's investors would not stand for no 3% over the last 30 years to make it happen. Your tax dollars did this, or rather, the citizens of Delaware ponied up for this.
But you just go on about your capitalist fairytale existence.
*Damn near all the serious R&D conducted over the last 40 years has been funded by the gov.*
And what might the public have done with the tax money that went into all of the government funded R&D had it stayed in their own pockets instead? Hmmm...lets see.
Some of those good folk might have purchased braces for their kids crooked teeth, others might have put the money in an account for their kids college....and others might have invested that money in companies doing R&D where they would have benefited not only from the fruits of the R&D (new products) but also a return on their (3% - 8%...or so) on the investment.
It's a win all around.
Government tends to pay top dollar or more for everything ($300.00 toilet seats)! It also tends to spend money it does not have. The public PAYS INTEREST ON THE DEBT. Now tell me how that is better?
(From Jack) Thank you Lib, you encouraged me to go looking on the internet and wow...there was no shortage of Dept. of Energy boondoggles! lol
Check this out, "Federal energy research has a poor track record. With regard to fossil fuels research, for example, the Congressional Budget Office has concluded: “Federal programs have had a long history of funding fossil-fuel technologies that, although interesting technically, had little chance of commercial implementation. As a result, much of the federal spending has not been productive.”1 That is a polite way of saying that these programs have been a waste of taxpayer money."
Want to read more? Here's the link, be my guest!
http://www.downsizinggovernment.org/energy/boondoggles
Dude, if you engage in R&D you have to be willing to accept the risk that not all the bright ideas are going to pan out. But you're not going to know until you do some work, and the work is going to cost money. You tell the 8% crowd you want to fund a project fooling around with chicken feathers, and see what kind of response you get. That's why you want your government in the game.
Libby you are such a bigot and so badly informed.
The bureaucracy, according to Jack's article, is costing the tax payer $24.2 BILLION A YEAR for it's 16,000 FEDERAL EMPLOYEES AND APPROXIMATELY 100,000 CONTRACT EMPLOYEES.
Whatever R&D happens is an expense on thop of the $24.2 billion a year.
Private money could do the actual R&D for a lot less, chicken feather research is weeded out for the very reason you cited, and profit is given to those who had the money to take the risk without making the taxpayer fund anything! Everybody wins, including the chiken feather guy who doesn't waste a good portion of his life on a project without a future.
It isn't rocket science. But you keep hating all those "rich" people Libby if it makes you sleep better.