I want to call readers’ attention to this story published a few days ago in the New York Times regarding a method of enticing homeowners to install solar panels.

From Europe’s Way of Encouraging Solar Arrives in the U.S.:

Put simply, the idea is to pay homeowners and businesses top dollar for producing green energy. In Germany, for example, a homeowner with a rooftop solar system may be paid four times more to produce electricity than the rate paid to a coal-fired power plant.

This month Gainesville, Fla., became the first city in the United States to introduce higher payments for solar power, which is otherwise too expensive for many families or businesses to install. City leaders, who control their electric utility, unanimously approved the policy after studying Germany’s solar-power expansion.

Now, let’s get political

I’m sure many will rail against this type of, “socialism,” because they feel (I no longer consider it to be rational thinking, but rather a “feeling”) that the, “free market,” if allowed to work, will provide us with such necessities.

The, “free market,” hasn’t brought us widespread green energy use.

Likewise, the, “free market,” didn’t bring us:

• The current, now-antiquated, once state-of-the-art energy grid
• The current, now-antiquated, once state-of-the-art railway system
• The U.S. Interstate Highway system
• The many intrastate highway systems
• The internet
• Air Traffic Control
• Most of our public transportation networks
• Public education
• Nuclear energy

Among other necessary infrastructural necessities we rely upon…

Yes, that non-green, touted-as-green nuclear energy that so many of the same people who will label solar power as, “unable to compete,” in the so-called, “free market” have no problem overlooking the large subsidies it takes to get nuclear energy reactors built.  There’s a reason there hasn’t been ground broken to build a nuclear reactor in the United States since 1977.   It has to do with the bad economics combined with safety concerns.

The, “free market,” might bring us ideas, but so many of them require the might of government to implement, and oh-so many of the ideas some would say, “came from the free market,” were brewed in collaboration with  some of our publicly funded research institutions.

What’s the point?

We use these systems everyday (for example, you’re reading this on the built-with-public-money internet right now).  We rely upon them, our economy has been the best the world over so long as we have kept them in top shape.

They’re beginning to fail us.  We’ve had many forget that all of those systems listed above have allowed us to flourish — that, whether you use the public trains and buses or not, you benefit, because you benefit from the cheap, cleaner alternative if you use it, you benefit from a smoother economy, where workers who serve necessary purposes can get to work and the roads are more navigable,  if you don’t. They forget that the money invested is too big a bet for anyone in the, “free market,” to place.  That’s where the government steps in.  And we have to keep people working to maintain and improve those systems, or we clearly fall behind.

Can You Get By on a Trickle?

The Budget Showdown… We have to learn from the eight years that monstrous tax cuts for the rich didn’t work.  This theory that we would give huge tax cuts to the rich, who, first, can most afford to pay the large tax burden, and who, second, deserve to because they benefit most from the large costs that government bears to protect their ability to make so much money (hello, subsidized military, police, highways, air traffic control, market regulatory framework) would somehow entice them to spend more and that it would trickle down to the rest of us has not played out.  The money enticed more greedy ways and the results of their complex financial derivative betting has in fact poured down on the rest of us.

I missed out on my trickle.  Or maybe I just didn’t feel it.  I feel the pouring rain of a failing economy due to mismanagement.

I’m going to have to call out Senator Mitch McConnell, the Senate Minority Leader.

Senator, there’s a reason you’re in the minority.  Your party’s ideology has failed America.  I watched with disgust as you cried out against Rahm Immanuel, Barack Obama’s Chief of Staff on Today this morning, for daring to see the need for stimulus as an opportunity to pay for public needs that should have been funded long ago.

Your party, that is, the Republicans, made the erroneous decision to favor, “tax cut and spend,” over the Democrats’, “tax and spend,” program.  Your party is largely to blame for current circumstances — your deregulation, tax cuts overwhelmingly for the rich, spending on a needless, proven-to-be-based-on-false-pretenses war, ignoring government duties to rebuild infrastructure (and build new, green infrastructure) all while squandering money that could have been used on said purposes on overpriced security detail (I’m looking at Blackwater) and no-bid contracts in Iraq and pushing for such large deregulations (I’m looking at a tree sheers literally cutting up the law).

Your party’s philosophy has allowed your, “free market,” compatriots to play a game of, “heads we win, tails the taxpayers lose,” (my thanks to Paul Krugman for this phrase) — in no way has your way proven to work.  We tried Reaganomics for thirty years and it failed us.  It’s back to government taking a role in those functions we need it to.

You even railed against government taking on the healthcare crisis.  Heaven forbid we take care of those who need help!? You would rather give tax cuts to those who deserve to pay more than to help those who need it.  Again, they deserve to pay, not just because they can but also because they benefit more from government spending.

You also don’t get to rewrite history.  George Bush squandered a record budget surplus that he inherited and handed off a record budget deficit to President Obama.  Deficit spending was fine back then, just so your party could increase inequality (while claiming it wasn’t) and allow the crazies from the Project For a New American Century (PNAC), hellbent on expanding the American Empire, to manage our foreign policy (and bankrupt us further).

Watching the Neocons from PNAC manipulate George W. Bush was like watching an eight-year long episode of Pinky and the Brain!

We need a party willing to see this type of problem as something to be fixed but also an opportunity to make things right — and green energy is a large part of that. Your party, much less than understanding of that, would rather do what didn’t work for the last eight years — deregulate and give more tax cuts to the rich.  On Today, you were asked by George Stephanopolis for an alternative budget, and all you could muster was to amend President Obama’s — probably by cutting out spending and giving more tax cuts.

Your party’s ideology and wasteful spending of money that the government didn’t have because they stopped collecting in order to pander to a very small portion of the populace (amounting to just bad public policy) has failed.  And now you want to be the, “party of ‘no,’” which is fine, because in order to reenter the conversation and earn a seat at the table you all had better buck up.  Until then, enjoy being the annoying sideshow.

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