I’m on leave writing a book about my beloved stimulus, but when I heard about Rick Santorum’s big finish in Iowa, it reminded me: Didn’t someone advise Swampland readers to invest in Santorum back in May when Intrade was giving him a 0.5% chance to win the nomination, because “that’s going to rise as the [...]
Monetary policy is dull, so the Republican Party’s bizarre advocacy of job-killing tight-money policies during a jobs crisis hasn’t gotten much attention. But political food fights are exciting, so today’s letter from GOP leaders pressuring Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke not to approve more monetary stimulus is likely to get a lot of attention. The [...]
Washington “scandals” have a predictable rhythm, and the Solyndra solar loan “scandal” has entered the phase where critics start exploiting the controversy to push their ideological agenda.
It will not surprise my loyal fans—Hey, Dad!—that I like President Obama’s jobs bill. It’s a second stimulus, and when I haven’t been flacking the first, I’ve been kvetching for more. When unemployment is 9% and federal borrowing is practically free, it’s time to pay construction workers who need jobs to fix schools that need [...]
Nobody’s going to care that all successful loan programs have failures, that the Solyndra venture was barely 1% of the Energy Department’s $40 billion clean-energy portfolio, that there will still be over $2 billion in reserves for busted loans no matter how Solyndra shakes out. That’s politics.
Governor Rick “Galileo” Perry declared at the Reagan Library last night that President Obama and his 2009 stimulus have “proven once and for all that government spending will not create one job.” Actually, in the last quarter, even though the stimulus was winding down, it created 555,029 jobs directly, and according to the nonpartisan Congressional [...]
Nobody’s going to notice this, because nobody’s going bankrupt, but the Obama administration just approved a conditional commitment for the largest residential solar project in history, an effort to install photovoltaic panels on up to 160,000 rooftops at 124 military bases in 33 states. With its $344 million federal loan guarantee, the SolarStrong Project will [...]
My lefty friends have been asking me: If I think President Obama has been so great for the earth, and I think his enviro critics are ungrateful whiners, then how do I defend his capitulation to industry on new smog regulations? And the answer is…I don’t. He ignored the science, threw the EPA under the [...]
Republicans are already dancing on the grave of Solyndra, the solar panel manufacturer that received a $535 million federal loan in 2009 and collapsed on Wednesday. Here’s more music they can dance to: Sources tell me the Obama administration restructured the loan this winter, so taxpayers probably won’t even be the first creditors to get [...]
Well, I guess the reports of the solar manufacturer Solyndra’s death weren’t so exaggerated after all. Just a few months premature. Solyndra declared bankruptcy on Wednesday and laid off its 1,100 employees. I’ll have more to say about this after I chat with the smooth-talkers who got me to report in June that Solyndra “no [...]
