American Thinker: Power to the People

American Thinker: Power to the People: "Using taxpayer-subsidized solar power panels as a backdrop, President Obama recently announced another $3.4B in taxpayer subsidies to help upgrade the nation's electrical power grid. The spending includes 'smart meters' that theoretically could be used by bribable government officials to throttle back power to the homes of unsupportive constituents.

Not that they actually would engage in such despicable extortion, of course...

Okay, maybe in Chicago.

And Detroit.

Mr. Obama likened the power-distribution portion of the project to the national highway system of fifty years ago. (That's the same taxpayer-funded highway system that nostalgic Leftists now blame for bankrupting the private sector passenger railroad industry.)

It seems odd that an anti-business politician such as Mr. Obama would want to spend taxpayer money to enrich coal-burning and nuclear power companies by funding the construction of their transmission lines. What next -- massive subsidies for a national system of pipelines for oil companies? After all, both are simply private-sector energy-distribution networks.

The explanation is that this particular spending will be showered on the so-called green energy companies. The Einsteins in Washington finally figured out that since few people live in really windy places like North Dakota, funding thousands of wind turbines there doesn't buy votes in New York. They need bigger cables to transport all that subsidized power from the windswept plains to the Upper West Side of Manhattan. So the power grid funding really is just more government spending for wasteful green projects."