





Clean energy spending

The Pew report comments:




China windmills




Source: Pew Research Center [PDF]

Comments     Threshold


By retrospooty on 4/23/2013 12:50:53 PM , Rating: 3
The US govt. is failing in one major way... Spending too much money. Spending more money on green energy is not going to help that. They needd to be spending less in ALL areas, including the money pit that is green energy.

RE: The sky is falling... I mean the USA is falling.
By Mint on 4/23/2013 5:48:38 PM , Rating: 2
If your goal is to increase unemployment, sure, you can do that.

The private sector isn't going to create demand out of thin air. Today it has cheap, idle, plentiful capital and labor yet is barely hiring as fast as population growth. What do you think is going to happen when people/companies dependent on gov't employment/contracts lose income/revenue? More layoffs.

By KCjoker on 4/23/2013 5:59:33 PM , Rating: 2
It would get worse before it gets better. However that's far better than the alternative which we are doing now. Right now we just going further and further down. Rip the band aid off and get it over with.

By Mint on 4/23/2013 8:00:42 PM , Rating: 2
There's no indication that it will ever get better. The current trajectory is ugly, but it's better than making it worse.

The bandaid has already been ripped off. Private debt growth has been a crutch for the US economy for 25 years before the recession. Whatever high income earners didn't want to spend/invest was put in bank accounts (or near equivalents), and it was the banks' responsibility to lend all of it back out so that the economy didn't stagnate.

It too much now. The banks have proven they can't lend that much without screwing up, and even if they were less greedy/deceptive, IMO it's an impossible task anyway. Even with with near 0% interest rates, people with money continue to save as opposed to consuming.

Without more consumption from those who can afford it, there will be no reason to ramp up hiring for current production and no reason to ramp up investment for future production. That's the bottom line.

Lower gov't spending and does nothing to solve this fundamental demand issue in the short or long term; in fact, it makes it worse.



By Flunk on 4/24/2013 9:12:06 AM , Rating: 2
Have you seen the chart of where funding goes? Military is where the cuts need to be, it's the biggest expenditure by far and a lot of that money goes to pork-barrel projects.

