With payback periods of 190 to 452 years, these wind turbines in the UK make no sense at all.
by Michael Bastasch
Towns all over Britain are blowing millions of dollars on wind turbines that are generating almost no revenue and will take hundreds of years to pay for themselves, reports the UK Telegraph.
The Telegraph reports that UK localities are spending hundreds of pounds installing wind turbines in an effort to boost renewable energy generation and fight global warming.
“Some turbines generate so little energy they would take hundreds of years to repay their original value,” reports the Telegraph. “Experts argue that the failure of some wind turbines to recoup their value shows how small wind turbines are a poor way to generate renewable energy.” Continue reading
And Obama said that increasing the debt limit didn’t increase debt.
The debt of the federal government, which is normally subject to a legal limit, jumped by $409 billion in the month of October, according to the U.S. Treasury.
That equals approximately $3,567 for each household in the United States, and is the second-largest one month jump in the debt in the history of the country.
In the continuing resolution deal sealed by President Barack Obama and the Republican congressional leadership last month, the legal limit on the federal debt was suspended until February 7 of next year. Continue reading
We find remarkable that the Senate approved Monday a so-called “farm bill” that calls for nearly $1 trillion in questionable spending and hardly a discouraging word has been heard on Capitol Hill.
Chalk that up to still-fresh outrage over revelations of the Obama administration’s monitoring of Americans’ phone records, Internet accounts and credit card transactions, and still-simmering concerns about Internal Revenue Service abuses and Justice Department abrogation of press freedom.
by George Landrith
Dr. Thomas Sowell, the Stanford University based economist, wrote this week that when he was teaching he would ask his students to consider this: “Imagine a government agency with only two tasks: (1) building statues of Benedict Arnold and (2) providing life-saving medications to children. If this agency’s budget were cut, what would it do?” Sowell posits that the agency would naturally cut back on medications for children. He explains that is the only result that would lead to getting the budget cuts restored. And he pointedly explains why the government wouldn’t cut back on the silly statues: “If they cut back on building statues of Benedict Arnold, people might ask why they were building statues of Benedict Arnold in the first place.”
Dr. Sowell is absolutely correct! Years ago, when I served on a local school board I witnessed this almost reflexive response every year the budget was tight. The most absurd things were never offered for cuts. They always threatened to cut the things that would most outrage the public. They talked about cutting bus routes for kids that lived far away from schools. They talked about crowded classrooms. Continue reading
by George Landrith
With the sequester deadline looming, there has been a marked uptick in the hyperbole emanating from Washington. Little wonder, a Pew Research poll says that only about one in four is paying close attention to the sequester.
This must be disconcerting to the White House because it has been full-court pressing the issue — suddenly releasing criminals from prison, falsely claiming that teachers are being pink-slipped, holding campaign style events with President Barack Obama personally issuing overblown and false warnings that firemen and policemen and teachers will be pink-slipped, that air traffic will be at greater risk, that waiting times at airports will increase and that meat will not be inspected and may be tainted. The White House even announced that it won’t deploy an aircraft carrier to a hotspot because of sequester budget constraints. Continue reading
by Nolan Finley 
Playing the crisis card won’t work forever for President Barack Obama. At some point, the people will expect their leader to lead.
And the president hasn’t yet demonstrated the will to do so. Instead, he answers monumental moments such as the upcoming sequestration deadline with brinksmanship and blame-gaming.
For now, the approach is working. A Pew/USA Today poll last week found decisively more voters blame Continue reading
by George F. Will
Even during this desultory economic recovery, one industry thrives — the manufacture of synthetic hysteria. It is, however, inaccurate to accuse the Hysteric in Chief of crying “Wolf!” about spending cuts under the sequester. He is actually crying “Hamster!”
As in: Batten down the hatches — the sequester will cut $85 billion from this year’s $3.6 trillion budget! Or: Head for the storm cellar — spending will be cut 2.3 percent! Or: Washington chain-saw massacre — we must scrape by on 97.7 percent of current spending! Or: Chaos is coming because the sequester will cut a sum $25 billion larger than was just shoveled out the door (supposedly, but not actually) for victims of Hurricane Sandy! Or: Heaven forfend, the sequester will cut 47 percent as much as was spent on the AIG bailout! Or: Famine, pestilence and locusts will come when the sequester causes federal spending over 10 years to plummet from $46 trillion all the way down to $44.8 trillion! Or: Grass will grow in the streets of America’s cities if the domestic agencies whose budgets have increased 17 percent under President Obama must endure a 5 percent cut! Continue reading
by Taylor Bigler
Big Bird is a billionaire. A Warren Buffett, Eric Schmidt, Steve Jobs billionaire, which is pretty impressive considering that he is not a real person but rather a giant, yellow bird (which is a kind of terrifying concept if you actually think about it for a second.)
Advocates for continued federal funding of the Public Broadcasting Service got their undies in a twist Wednesday night when GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney said that he would cut funding to the beloved TV station to reduce the national deficit. Continue reading
Ringing the Obamaphone
Nine days after Mother Jones magazine posted a video showing Mitt Romney making his now famous “47 percent” remarks, an Obama voter in Ohio validated the broad point Romney had tried to make: A lot of people are going to vote for Obama purely for the free stuff.
The idea that some people receive more from the state than they give to it and therefore vote to keep the gravy train running is neither new nor controversial — nor incorrect. For evidence, see the “Obamaphone” video. Continue reading
by David Asman • FoxNews Business
Right now, President Obama and Mitt Romney are looking for the one line that will stand out as the defining line of the debate, a line that encapsulates the candidate’s reason for running and all his frustrations with the other guy. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a solution for the nation’s problems. But it does have to immediately resonate with voters.
In 1980, the quip that stood out was challenger Ronald Reagan’s dismissive, “There you go again…” to President Carter. Folks knew exactly what Reagan meant: that we had seen through Carter’s attempts to attack Reagan’s supposedly “radical tendencies” as a dodge to distract voters from Carter’s responsibility for an ever-weakening America. Continue reading
But in 2010, 
on the eve of the passage of Obamacare, Obama told the House Democratic Caucus, “Everybody who’s looked at it says that every single good idea to bend the cost curve and start actually reducing health care costs are in this bill.” And on that score, he was dead wrong. Many experts, and even former Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean, said at that time that Obamacare would cause more, not less, health spending. Now a slew of new reports confirms their analysis.
by John Fund
The smartest parents in Chicago right now are those whose kids attend charter schools, private schools, or parochial schools. Those institutions don’t employ Chicago’s unionized public-school teachers, who went out on strike this morning for the first time in 25 years.
The coverage of the strike has obscured some basic facts. The money has continued to pour into Chicago’s failing public schools in recent years. Chicago teachers have the highest average salary of any city at $76,000 a year before benefits. The average family in the city only earns $47,000 a year. Yet the teachers rejected a 16 percent salary increase over four years at a time when most families are not getting any raises or are looking for work. Continue reading
by Bernie Woodall and Paul Lienert and Ben Klayman (Reuters)
Nearly two years after the introduction of the path-breaking plug-in hybrid, GM is still losing as much as $49,000 on each Volt it builds, according to estimates provided to Reuters by industry analysts and manufacturing experts.
Cheap Volt lease offers meant to drive more customers to Chevy showrooms this summer may have pushed that loss even higher. There are some Americans paying just $5,050 to drive around for two years in a vehicle that cost as much as $89,000 to produce. Continue reading
When businesses feed at the federal trough, they threaten public support for business and free markets.
by Charles G. Koch
“We didn’t build this business—somebody else did.”
So reads a sign outside a small roadside craft store in Utah. The message is clearly tongue-in-cheek. But if it hung next to the corporate offices of some of our nation’s big financial institutions or auto makers, there would be no irony in the message at all.
It shouldn’t surprise us that the role of American business is increasingly vilified or viewed with skepticism. In a Rasmussen poll conducted this year, 68% of voters said they “believe government and big business work together against the rest of us.” Continue reading
by Louis Woodhill
President Obama is proud of his bailout of General Motors. That’s good, because, if he wins a second term, he is probably going to have to bail GM out again. The company is once again losing market share, and it seems unable to develop products that are truly competitive in the U.S. market.
Right now, the federal government owns 500,000,000 shares of GM, or about 26% of the company. It would need to get about $53.00/share for these to break even on the bailout, but the stock closed at only $20.21/share on Tuesday. This left the government holding $10.1 billion worth of stock, and sitting on an unrealized loss of $16.4 billion. Continue reading