The Farm Bill is Just More Waste

Well if we look close, as the Wisconsin Energy Coop did to the new Farm Bill proposal, all kinds of nonsense and waste by the Federal Government comes to light - most politicians are like mushrooms, they do their best work in the dark.

This article, published in the Wisconsin Energy Coop magazine, points up some tactics that our 'betters' tried to stick us with when this monster bill was released.

Yeah, I know this is a 'special interest' magazine, but all the same, we all need electricity and more of it every day, but we're not going to get if someone doesn't fight the 'good fight' for us - look what happened with ethanol because we did nothing to stop it, now we are paying over $.50 a gallon to support this mess and it's causing huge problems with food prices and foreign markets are screaming, especially in the third world.

Is this part of the global warming religious nightmare or just more of the same coming from those who just want America to take a new direction? You decide -

A Season to be Wary

This morning marked the fourth time this season I had to re-attach my mailbox, courtesy of our local highway department’s snow plows.
I noticed that a neighbor, obviously fed up with his own repeated efforts to keep his rural mailbox upright, came up with what’s proved so far to be an effective—though perhaps not entirely legal—solution. He lashed his mailbox assembly to a nearby highway sign, figuring that no plowing personnel would dare touch a fixture that they themselves might be obliged to fix. He’s probably right that it’s in a more protected situation, regulations about messing with highway signs notwithstanding.

Similarly, as opportunities present themselves during legislative sessions, lawmakers routinely seek to attach pet proposals to larger, higher-profile packages that have exceptional chances of passage and enactment. Often, like relatively flimsy mailboxes in the midst of a snowstorm, the smaller initiatives might not have much of a chance to stand on their own against the force of close scrutiny. Depending on your particular interest, this can be good or bad.

Attached, Embedded

During December, the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA) waded through literally thousands of pages that comprised a federal Energy Bill, Farm Bill, and an “omnibus” Fiscal Year ’08 spending bill—huge packages that, in one form or another, were almost certainly destined for congressional approval. The devil, as they say, is in the details, and these behemoth bills had enough to keep a platoon of NRECA lobbyists busy ensuring that good features were retained and provisions harmful to electric co-ops were omitted.

Embedded in the taxation portion of the Energy Bill, for instance, was authorization for electric co-ops’ use of some $600 million in clean renewable energy bonds, which would advance local development of renewable energy sources. Causing concern, on the other hand, was language mandating that 15 percent of all energy produced would come from renewables by the year 2020—a standard some states, particularly in the South, say they’d have great trouble achieving. The status of the proposals was unclear at press time.

Tempting Tidbits

At the state level in recent months, the Governor’s Task Force on Global Warming and its numerous subcommittees have been evaluating a long roster of proposals for possible inclusion in a comprehensive report due to be finalized in early 2008. It’s pretty clear that firm legislative and regulatory proposals will take their lead from the task force report and, like the huge bills mentioned above, will have momentum to be enacted.

There’s also the temptation for policymakers and interest groups to attach recommendations that might otherwise fail for lack of broad support. Electric co-op representatives have been serving on the task force and its work groups, and they’ve helped turn aside several troublesome suggestions offered by other panel members that could negatively impact electric consumers. Among them: 1) outlawing the use of electric hot water heaters in Wisconsin and 2) requiring that before anyone can sell a home that the dwelling must be brought up to strict, modern energy efficiency standards.

As with affixing a mailbox to a sturdy highway sign, pegging proposals to a massive policy initiative might provide an alluring opportunity, but they still need scrutiny to determine if they serve the broader public interest.

As this article points out, our leaders have no clue what is going on outside of their ivory towers.

Stay warm and keep the faith, the battle is joined!