The proposed aid package to help people mitigate damage from hurricane Sandy is a good illustration of why the government can’t decrease spending. Instead of just dealing with storm damage, Obama’s $60.4 billion request for hurricane Sandy relief, which was passed by the 112^th Senate but not the House, has morphed into a pork-laden give-away to special interests. The 113^th Congress has passed an interim $9.7 billion aid bill leaving the remainder in limbo.

According to the New York Post, the hurricane Sandy aide package included: $8 million to buy cars and equipment for the Homeland Security and Justice departments; $150 million for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to dole out to fisheries in Alaska; $2 million for the Smithsonian Institution to repair museum roofs in DC; $13 billion for”mitigation” projects to prepare for future storms; $207 million for the VA Manhattan Medical Center; $41 million to fix up eight military bases along the storm’s path, including Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; $4 million for repairs at Kennedy Space Center in Florida; $3.3 million for the Plum Island Animal Disease Center and $1.1 million to repair national cemeteries.

The legislation dealing with the “fiscal cliff” was also laden with pork, mainly to help crony capitalists in the renewable energy sector. According to the Heritage Foundation:

“The fiscal cliff deal is not only preventing certain politically motivated energy tax policies from falling off the cliff, but it’s also resurrecting ones that have been dead and buried for a year.

“Lumped into the 157-page fiscal cliff bill are extensions of energy handouts that were originally scheduled to retire, as well as retroactively rewarded tax breaks for renewable energy that expired at the end of 2011. The inclusion of these targeted tax breaks is a clear indication that Congress is not serious about (1) reducing spending, (2) ending the government’s meddling in the energy sector, or (3) standing up against political interests.

“The extension and resurrection of the targeted tax credits will reduce revenue by $18 billion over 10 years. Production tax credits for wind (totaling $12 billion) were renewed for another year and made even more generous. Thanks to the new bill, wind and other renewable energy projects can receive the tax credit simply by starting construction by 2013, rather than once they begin generating electricity, as the law originally specified.

“Further, the fiscal cliff deal retroactively rewards a production tax credit for biofuel and biodiesel production, which expired in 2011, and extends it through 2013. Tax credit extensions also go out to electric motorcycles, alternative fueling stations, coal facilities on Indian lands, cellulosic ethanol, and energy efficient windows, appliances, and new homes.”

This situation reminds me of a quote attributed to former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher: “The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.” Congress has yet to acknowledge that caveat. Apparently, nothing in Washington, D.C. can be straight forward.  Instead, almost everything is laden with pork-packed proposals for pet projects.

The administration’s rosy hope: If we build it, they will sell, hasn’t panned out. Sales of GM’s hybrid Volt and Nissan’s Leaf are much below expectations in spite of heavy U.S. government subsidies. In fact, GM is temporarily suspending Volt production – again. Even the liberal Washington Post is disenchanted:

“No matter how you slice it, the American taxpayer has gotten precious little for the administration’s investment in battery-powered vehicles, in terms of permanent jobs or lower carbon dioxide emissions. There is no market, or not much of one, for vehicles that are less convenient and cost thousands of dollars more than similar-sized gas-powered alternatives — but do not save enough fuel to compensate. The basic theory of the Obama push for electric vehicles — if you build them, customers will come — was a myth. And an expensive one, at that.”

Part of the problem is that electric cars are impractical due to their limited range given the current state of battery technology. We knew that 100 years ago. The vehicle in the photo is the 1911 Baker Electric which could go 50 miles on one battery charge. The GM Volt can go 40 miles on a charge. The Nissan Leaf claims 100 miles on a charge, but that varies from 47 to 138 miles depending on conditions. By the way, hybrid vehicles, first developed in 1916, just make automobiles unnecessarily complex.

Emphasizing the impracticality of electric cars, a story last year about driving a Leaf from San Diego, California, to Tucson, Arizona, found that what is normally an 8-hour drive took a week in a Leaf.

GM is losing money on each Volt they make. They are selling the Volt for about $40,000 (much more expensive than comparable gasoline-power models), but it costs GM $89,000 to manufacture the vehicle according to Reuters.

Sales of the Volt have been weak even though federal agencies (i.e. taxpayers) have been buying or plan to buy them.

Another, related issue is The EPA’s Electric Vehicle Mileage Fraud. The EPA calculates a miles-per-gallon equivalent (MPGe) for electric cars that estimates the amount of fossil fuels which must be burned to create the electricity to charge the batteries of an electric car. In a Forbes article, Warren Meyers shows that “The EPA’s methodology is flawed because it assumes perfect conversion of the potential energy in fossil fuels to electricity, an assumption that violates the second law of thermodynamics. The Department of Energy has a better methodology that computes electric vehicle equivalent mileage based on real world power plant efficiencies and fuel mixes, while also taking into account energy used for refining gasoline for traditional cars. Using this better DOE methodology, we get MPGe’s for electric cars that are barely 1/3 of the EPA figures.”

It seems that the great green hype is more hope than reality. This exercise in crony capitalism and green dreaming demonstrates the incompetence of government in the marketplace.

See also:

Does the Chevy Volt produce more CO2 from its battery than from its gasoline engine

Tax Dollars to Build Charging Stations for Electric Vehicles

The Chevy Volt, just the latest expensive toy

Which Vehicles Are Most Energy Efficient?

Do you wonder where your tax money goes? One place is corporate welfare. According to the Cato Institute, corporate welfare totaled $100 billion in fiscal 2012 (see full report here).

The executive summary of the report:

Rising federal spending and huge deficits are pushing the nation toward a financial and economic crisis. Policymakers should find and eliminate wasteful, damaging, and unneeded programs in the federal budget. One good way to save money would be to cut subsidies to businesses. Corporate welfare in the federal budget costs taxpayers almost $100 billion a year.

Policymakers claim that business subsidies are needed to fix alleged market failures or to help American companies better compete in the global economy. However, corporate welfare often subsidizes failing and mismanaged businesses and induces firms to spend more time on lobbying rather than on making better products. Instead of correcting market failures, federal subsidies misallocate resources and introduce government failures into the marketplace.

While corporate welfare may be popular with policymakers who want to aid home-state businesses, it undermines the broader economy and transfers wealth from average taxpaying households to favored firms. Corporate welfare also creates strong ties between politicians and business leaders, and these ties are often the source of corruption scandals in Washington. Americans are sick and tired of “crony capitalism,” and the way to solve the problem is to eliminate business subsidy programs.

Corporate welfare doesn’t aid economic growth and it is an affront to America’s constitutional principles of limited government and equality under the law. Policymakers should therefore scour the budget for business subsidies to eliminate. Budget experts and policymakers may differ on exactly which programs represent unjustified corporate welfare, but this study provides a menu of about $100 billion in programs to terminate.

See also:

Renewables receive bulk of tax preference subsidies