More Boondoggles

Boondoggle 3

Last week I heard that Governor Markell planned to purchase hybrid cars to save money given our dire financial straits. Who has ever saved a dime by buying a hybrid?!!!  Apparently there is a doofus in DE state government thinks that we will be the first.  Every analysis of these little gems that I have read prove that they will be in the scrap yard polluting the groundwater with their lithium batteries years before you save enough gas to pay for their higher cost.  I think that I see a cloud of Smug (obscure South Park reference) forming over Dover.  It may be a combination of this and the one being generated by the Dover city council with their solar installation, which I wrote about previously, that is set to fleece their poor citizens.

Boondoggle 4

Wilmington is installing 2,300 solar panels at one of the city’s water filtration plants.  They will save $60,000 per year.  They will also be selling Delmarva Power $120,000 per year in renewable energy credits, so they claim to be “saving or creating” (obscure Obama reference) $180,000 per year.  Let’s set aside for the moment that the only way Delmarva gets the money to buy the credits is by raising their rates to the taxpayers; so while the taxpayer is not paying the $120,000 to the city, it is just being collected in higher utility bills.

These solar panels are costing the taxpayer $8.9 million!!!  That means that even counting the phony credits, it would be 49 years before any money would be saved!  (There was a good letter about this in the NJ yesterday.  He beat me to publication.)  But these things will have been hauled away to the dump 20 years before that.  The city says that most of this will be paid for with federal money.  No one seems to quite get that it is all the same source.  It is a lousy deal for the taxpayer no matter who extracts the money from them.

I really hope that someone is getting a big kickback for selling the taxpayers down the river with all of this nonsense because the alternative is that the people making these decisions are  really stupid.  I would much prefer that they were crooks than idiots.  At least crooks can be entertaining while the tax money disappears, you might even end up with a good movie or maybe a miniseries and it makes for great conversation.  Plus, crooks can be thrown out of office, into jail and you are rid of them (except in DC of course).  Idiots are forever or at least until retirement.

I do not have any objection to people selling these phony energy saving gadgets nor do I have an objection to people voluntarily buying them with all of their own money.  It is when the money being wasted is taken from people under the threat of prison and death that I object.  Look at the jerk governor of Maryland.  Broke like the rest of the states, but he signs up to pay double or triple for windmill electricity.  Stupid, yes but no evidence of crookedness.

Thanks to JJ1234 for reminding me of  “boondoggle” in his/her comment to a previous posting about solar panels.  It is the perfect word.

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