President Joe Biden and Democrats in Congress have set their sights on crafting a massive spending package billed as investments in the nation’s infrastructure, with a focus on “green” projects to combat climate change.
Unfortunately, American taxpayers have seen prior spending “investments” in green energy technologies be wasted in recent years as many of the purportedly climate-friendly recipients of government funds have gone bankrupt in spite of the infusion of taxpayer money, The Daily Wire reported.
“Green” energy investment failures
Biden even had a hand in those previous wastes of money, as the then-vice president had been tapped to oversee the distribution of funds in the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act that was, until the COVID pandemic, the largest spending measure ever put forward by Congress.
Promoted as a means to help rescue the nation from the Great Recession of 2009, that massive stimulus bill disbursed billions of taxpayer dollars to numerous “green” energy companies by way of government-backed grants and loans.
Solyndra, a solar power company that received $535 million in guaranteed loans, went bankrupt less than two years later. There was also electric automaker Fisker, and an affiliated battery company, that received $529 million and $279 million in loans, respectively, before going bankrupt within a few years of receiving those taxpayer dollars.
Biden plans to “go even bigger”
Hundreds of millions, if not billions, of loaned taxpayer money simply evaporated in those failed investments in dozens of companies. Rather than learn from that mistake of attempting to pick winners and losers in a fluid market economy, it appears Biden is prepared to double down and do the same thing again.
Such was the takeaway from a New York Times report which asserted that the lesson learned by Biden from those past failures was to “go even bigger” this time around.
The report laid out how Biden is making “green” and “clean” energy investment the “centerpiece of his proposal for trillions of dollars, not billions, on government grants, loans, and tax incentives to spark renewable power, energy efficiency and electric car production.”
The Biden administration and its allies in Congress, in response to critics who point to prior failures, argue that “this time things will be different,” because not enough money was used last time and because of the increased demand for green energy.
Package price tag continues to grow
Getting Biden’s plan passed through Congress will be no easy task, however, particularly as the scope of the “infrastructure” bill expands well beyond actual infrastructure, and as the overall price tag for the proposal continues to swell, according to The Washington Post.
The Biden administration’s initial proposal was about $3 trillion in spending with around $1 trillion in new taxes, but concerns about increasing the federal deficit and national debt with more borrowing, as well as the continual addition of new spending proposals, have ballooned into a package that includes upwards of $4 trillion in additional spending and more than $3 trillion in new tax revenues.
Given the inefficiency of federal spending and market interventions, as well as Biden’s own dismal track record in attempting to pick winners and losers with taxpayer funds, this “infrastructure” package will almost certainly become the latest expensive boondoggle that will do much more harm than good.
The post Biden plans to spend trillions of taxpayer dollars on ‘green’ energy investments first appeared on Conservative Institute.
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