Impact.

I mentioned on Friday that I’d been wondering when Organizing for Action née the Obama campaign was going to throw their full weight behind the White House and Democrats’ ferociously crucial endeavor to “inform” the public about the many “benefits” with which the “Affordable” Care Act is going to be [forcibly] serving them, because without [...]

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Blowback.

Over the past decade, Spain has taken to offering pretty huge subsidies and other various incentives to actively encourage the growth of wind and solar energy — the result of which is that the country is overrun with more wind and solar farms than the country knows what to do with, and yet both types [...]

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Who could've seen this coming?

President Obama has many times insisted that we need to relentlessly continue making the renewable-energy “investments” that will help the United States create “green jobs” and give us a competitive edge against countries like China and help us “win the future” — but whatever miraculous future he’s referring to is unclear, since China’s policies are [...]

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Priorities.

The Obama administration has rarely passed up an opportunity to continue their relentless subsidization of the biofuels industry — the EPA has lately been particularly defensive about their requirement that fuel producers mix part of their product with certain non-existent cellulosic biofuels, to several lawmakers’ chagrin — and the Obama administration even has the Pentagon [...]

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Where does it end?

The wind lobby’s do-or-die attitude in the run-up to the fiscal cliff last year was a very telling moment for the industry: Without the highly generous production tax credit and other subsidies they receive courtesy of the federal government (and by that, I of course mean taxpayers), no way can they possibly sustain the pace [...]

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Terrific.

It is perfectly true that there are a bunch of factors that together determine the prices we pay at the pump — oil is supplied, bought, and sold in a very global market, after all — and that the federal government doesn’t always have the ability to impact those factors. That said, there are also [...]

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Pour some sugar on me.

While the Obama administration has been working overtime to push their sequestration-scaremongering campaign, all about how $85 billion in cuts means that we won’t be able to afford White House tours or as many border patrol agents, it is amazing to me that stuff like this somehow never even gets a mention. Hey, how about [...]

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Living up to the hype is hard.

I really just hate to gloat, but… I kinda’ called this one. Late last summer, at about the same time as the failed federally-backed solar company Solyndra was in its death throes, the Obama administration decided to go full steam ahead with its loan guarantee program anyway, approving a $197 million loan to oh-so-promising startup [...]

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Yes.

There is no sector of the American economy that has been so systematically and unnecessarily coddled for so long as agriculture. Stretching back to the 1800s, the federal government has been steadily piling on a hugely complex network of subsidies, payouts, grants, insurances, exemptions, regulations, loan programs, tariffs, production controls, protections, and who even knows [...]

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Fiscal reality is hard.

For me, one of the most perplexing moments (out of the many) of President Obama’ State of the Union address last week was when he insisted that “as long as countries like China keep going all-in on clean energy, so must we.” So… because China is doing it, we must also relentlessly throw money we [...]

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Phoning it in.

Steel yourselves, because this egregious revelation may very well shock you: A well-meaning but perhaps overly ambitious federal assistance program that offers a taxpayer-subsidized benefit and does not have rigorous eligibility requirements, was fraudulently taken advantage of by millions of people. (I’ll pause here a moment to let you recover.) The Wall Street Journal reports [...]

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Because, logic.

Germany, which often prides itself on being a world leader in promoting (i.e., subsidizing) renewable energies and ‘sustainability,’ has been debating over whether or not they should open up their underground shale oil-and-gas reserves for hydraulic fracturing — with the necessarily accompanying ‘enlightened’-greenie protestations, of course. It’s not that Germany doesn’t use gas — they [...]

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So much green.

Accompanying the exits of Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and EPA Chief Lisa Jackson, it looks like President Obama is going for a full-on overhaul of his energy team, announcing Friday that a new Secretary of Energy is joining the list of Cabinet posts that need filling: Energy Secretary Steven Chu will be leaving his post, [...]

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Like two peas in a pod.

The United States might not have a strong organized-crime culture comparable to Italy’s (that I know of…?), but it most certainly does have a robustly organized rent-seeking culture which, in terms of opportunities foregone, has plenty of the same detrimental net economic effects. The Washington Post just reported on a story that all too clearly [...]

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Let's get real.

Like many states, Virginia has implemented certain tax breaks, quotas, and/or incentives on behalf of particular green technologies over the years, not because it was a legitimately excellent idea (read: California), but because it was just the vogue political thing to do at the time. Now that the economy is decidedly on the strugglebus and [...]

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Le sigh.

France’s government may be having difficulties on agreeing how to pay for, or at least appearing to pay for, their expensive and unsustainable socialist state, but never fear, greenies — unaffordable ‘renewable energy’ standards and subsidies will absolutely not fall prey to the awful specter of financial reality. European demand in general is falling off [...]

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Never mind!

Remember how the White House and Democrats promised that ObamaCare would “bend the cost curve downward”?  One key initiative involved spending billions to convert medical records into digital form, which supposedly would reduce costs by as much as $81 billion a year. Instead, the same group that insisted that would happen now says it might [...]

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Dagger.

Wind energy’s industry-wide freakout is finally over, at least for another year; the country’s “fastest growing energy source” — or, to put it just a bit more candidly, the country’s most expensively subsidized source per actual unit of energy output — will get to keep the wind production tax credit on which they are pretty [...]

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Subsidies gone sour.

A few weeks back, Department of Agriculture Secretary Vilsack lamented the declining influence of rural America and the agricultural lobby’s inability to push next year’s farm bill through Congress. What he conspicuously failed to mention, of course, is that the farm bill and the USDA’s many decades-old agricultural programs in general (numbering in the hundreds [...]

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Sink or swim.

The wind lobby is working like their livelihoods depend on it — which is mainly because, they do — to convince Congress to extend the production tax credit, set to expire at the start of the new year, that has diverted taxpayer money their way for decades now. Without the guarantee of continued federal assistance, [...]

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Yes, yes it is.

Over the weekend, Department of Agriculture Secretary Vilsack lamented that rural America is becoming less of a power-player in the United States’ political landscape. A month after an election that Democrats won even as rural parts of the country voted overwhelmingly Republican, the former Democratic governor of Iowa told farm belt leaders this past week [...]

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But, rain check on some of that offshore drilling.

So, the Department of Interior‘s plans to develop solar projects on public land — a.k.a., on public assets that the government is disallowing from being put to more productive uses — against which I’ve so often railed? Welcome to my nightmare. The WSJ reports: The U.S. will offer up federal acreage off the coasts of [...]

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