My Independence Institute colleague Todd Shepherd (formerly a reporter for KOA radio) runs the Complete Colorado website. It's laid out like the Drudge Report, and it presents Colorado news--including original reporting by Todd. He's just published an article on the 2.25 billion dollars in eco-pork that ten Colorado municipalities are seeking as part of the impending "stimulus" package. Among the requests from the city of Boulder is six million dollars in order to convert 60 cars (in the city, county, and University of Colorado fleets) from ordinary hybrids to plug-in hybrids. That's a hundred thousand dollars per car. Even in eco-conscious Boulder, it is very, very unlikely that voters would approve spending their own tax money on such an ineffecient spending project.
How to spend the Obama trillion: 100k per car to retrofit hybrids
it's raining money and it's the [upside down] umbrellas that are outrageous?
Rent seeking?
Why not just wait a year and buy 60 brand-new volts for $40,000 each (assuming GM's still around)?
where is sarcastro when you need him?
A girl is dead, and no one can show who did it. We'll never spend a smart tax dollar in this town again!
I had the good fortune of spending some time in Boulder, and while the crunchy lifestyle and pervasive biking access weren't really my bag, and the city is very exclusive, it's also as beautiful and clean as it is exclusive.
The project at hand sounds a little absurd, but it wouldn't surprise me if Boulder residents would have forked over their own cash for this -- there's currently a .4% sales tax in the city to fund an eco-friendly light rail train connecting Denver to Boulder and parts north, which has been approved despite reasonable claims that it won't help too many commuters -- it was seen as long term investment.
The fact is, Boulder residents, whether they're outdoor hobbyists or not, love their eco-friendly identity to a point of greenlighting some pretty marginal programs.
In terms of evaulating this as use of federal funds, I think your opinion tells you more about yourself than the proposal. It's either an example of small localities stealing money from the country to fund a vanity project, or -- if you believe that federal stimulus is what's required economically at this point -- it's still outlandish, but not the worst way to apportion funds.
Who has heard that in the 1930's Bagdad every 3rd citizen was a native Jew? The Sefardi (Safrati) Jews have a 400 year old history and the Mizrahi Jews over 2,500 year old history in the Middle East - outside the location of the state of Israel (Palestine).
Here's the statistics regarding not only the expelsion of Jews from various Moslim countries in the last 60 years that Israel has been an independent state, but also numbers expelled from the Europe in a longer time interval. The Jews are no settlers of colonialism:
http://www.helsinki.fi/~pjojala/Expelled-Jews-statistics.htm
60 years of survival. This is statistics, not Zionism. When the military means have lacked the power, it is now a time of a media war to spit on the Jews and curse the Jewish Scriptures. Both the Old and New Testament were written by Jews. Although Jasser Arafat in his books claimed that there never was any Jewish Temple in Jerusalem and that Jesus was not a Jew, he could not deceive the honest spectator
As a matter of fact, the population of Arabs (my beloved friends and brothers, just like the Jews, our common fathers) under the Israeli government was increased ten-fold (10X) in only 57 years. The Palestinian life expectancy increased from 48 to 72 years in 1967-1995. The death rate decreased by over 2/3 in 1970-1090 and the Israeli medical campaigns decreased the child deat rate from a level of 60 per 1000 in 1968 to 15 per 1000 in 2000. (An analogous figure was 64 in Iraq, 40 in Egypt, 23 in Jordan, and 22 in Syria in 2000). During 1967-1988 the amount of comprehensive schoold and second level polytechnic institutes for the Arabs was increased by 35%. During 1970-1986 the proportion of Palestinian women at the West Bank and Gaza not having gone to school decreased from 67 % to 32 %. The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita in West Bank and Gaza increased in 1968-1991 BKT from 165 US dollars to 1715 dollars (compare with 1630$ in Turkey, 1440$ in Tunis, 1050$ in Jordan, 800$ in Syria, 600$ in Egypt. and 400$ in Yemen).
One-fourth of the judgements of the Human Rights Commission of the United Nations strike Israel. Out of the incidences dealt in the Security Counsil one-third is having to do with Israel. I think this resembles the hysteria seen in the Black Plague in Europe, when the European Jews were accused of the pandemia and burned alive. The phobic mob was really scared and saw the peculiar Jews as a threat.
Pauli.Ojala@gmail.com
Finland
PS. Statistics of the beneficial impact of Jewish population to the host country in terms of inventions, science and technology:
http://www.helsinki.fi/~pjojala/Indicator.html
and your point for mentioning this here is what exactly?
plus you spelled inimitable wrong.
Good imitation of Sarcasto. Like s/he usually does, you miss the point and, as is often the case with him/her, the "humor" in your quote is tendentious and flat.
The point is not that government spending is bad or that local governments' trying to grab as big a pot of "free" federal grants as possible is bad. Rather this item illustrates that in their attempts to meet the requirements behind "free" federal money, local governments are frequently reduced to proposing absurdly useless and wasteful projects that are neither cost effective nor cost beneficial. As a previous poster pointed out, for less than half the money Boulder proposes to spend retrofitting this fleet of vehicles Boulder could buy a completely new fleet with all the desired features.
Nope. 'Rent seeking' is what cynical old businessmen do with government; this 'other thing' is what teenagers do with money.
What seems to be missed by those proposing this sort and esp. level of federal spending is that it isn't free money. Maybe free in the short term for the P.R.B. (People's Republic of Boulder for those who haven't lived near it).
At least much of FDR's public spending was aimed at building long term assets and infrastructure. Yet, even then, it is highly probable that that public spendin added a number of years to the Great Depression. Here we are talking apending much of a trillion dollars on what? In the long run, that money would do far more good if left in the pockets of the guy who earned it, instead of being spent on this sort of wasteful spending.
Besides, I don't think that the actual amount will drop. Rather, this frictional cost will increase, as the benefits of lobbying the government to get some of the gravy increases. So, any single gravy facilitator may earn a smaller percentage of the pie, but the pie will be a lot bigger, so the net gravy cut will rise accordingly.
This describes tax-and-spend, but the stimulus will be borrow-and-spend. For some reason I thought Obama ran as a democrat...
What must be remembered is that part of Boulder's problem with solving the JBR case was that due to their demographics, their police spend much more time arresting naked streakers wearing carved pumpkin heads (in the news yesterday, with the first plea bargain) than they do investigating murders. But having a very low murder rate should not have much to do with ability or inability to squander federal gravy money. Of course, which is part of why government spending and socialism are so pernicious.
It would be just fine if the money could come out of thin air. But the inevitable wastefullness of that spending is one reason that any stimulous affects are going to be swamped in the long run by its anti-stimulous affects.
Sure, maybe the Obama Administration and its Congressional expediters could possibly keep the Ponzi game going throughout that Administration. Doubtful, given the magnitude of spending proposed. But possible, esp. if this is any example of the level of spending anticipated. But eventually, the house of cards will fall, and when the economy finally responds to it, it will drive it that much further into recession or even depression.
Let's say we fire up the printing presses and provide the stimulus, and this helps speed economic recovery. Equity investments have been hit hard lately, but a market recovery won't help dollar denominated assets if the currency collapses due to a U.S. default.
Or am I being a pessimist?
1. Media often do this: cost/# of something = shocking per unit cost. Often it is crap, for a variety of reasons. Would the program build an infrastructure that would convert a hundred cars in the first year, and the year after, and the year after? Are these cars or city buses? Etc.
2. They don't have the money, they've just asked for the money. Anyone can ask for money. The nature of the program reflects on the nature of the stimulus only if they get the money.
You're absolutely correct. The sarcastic portion of my post completely missed how the unsolved Ramsey murder related to the following proposition: "Rather this item illustrates that in their attempts to meet the requirements behind "free" federal money, local governments are frequently reduced to proposing absurdly useless and wasteful projects that are neither cost effective nor cost beneficial."
Of course, now I see. In sarcastically lampooning a ridiculous association, I was really evincing ignorance as to a cost/benefit argument related to federal stimulus. My humor missed the point that an unsolved murder is at all germane to the issue.
I'd also note that in my post I was considering, primarily, the notion that this spending proposal was so wasteful that Boulder taxpayers would not have ever approved it with their own money. I discussed the light rail sales tax as evidence that Boulder residents do seem to be willing to bear a tax burden for clean transportation measures -- measures that many other cities, even notably liberal ones, may not be willing to undertake. In your rush to tell me how I was tendentious and what points I missed, you seemed to miss almost the entire thrust of my response.
If Boulder city is able to purchase a fleet of new plug-in cars more efficiently than the refit they've proposed and if that purchase is determined to be as beneficial a use of federal funds -- that is, if it acts as an equivalent economic stimulus per dollar, which, after all, is the nominal point of this spending spree -- then the rules for apportionment of "free" federal funds ought to be adjusted accordingly to allow for maximum efficiency.
I have no trouble admitting that the stimulus package likely carries with it some requirements and regulations that are, on balance, self-defeating, and if this Boulder city spending proposal is in part the result of paying deference to such rules, it shouldn't happen, and the money lost due to inefficiency is a mark of irresponsibile bureaucracy.
But I don't really that point reflected or emphasized in the initial posting. If Boulder were about to purchase a new fleet of plug-ins with federal money, this would also be expensive, and the suggestion could be made, as it was here, that the expense would preclude Boulder taxpayers from paying for the conversion themselves. They would only be doing it as part of a "free" pork grab bag. You could as easily call that eco-pork if you saw fit. $40,000 per car, if we accept the figure autolykos offered, is a lot of free money that you and I are providing.
Since I think we're both commenting on this issue without knowing, first of all, why exactly Boulder is undergoing a refitting that costs about %250 more than an equivalent new purchase -- and just where the money is being spent -- it may behoove us to find that out before we continue.
Earlier this year, a friend from Boulder mentioned a Boulder-based start-up that specialized in hybrid conversion. That could be the answer.
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