I can’t watch much of a State of the Union Address by any Democratic President, let alone Biden. It’s just too painful. But as a service to readers, I did watch a small portion, and then I skimmed through the transcript when it was released by the White House.
Mostly, this exercise is useful be sure one understands the governing philosophy that informs our President and at least the Democrats in Congress. And this speech does inform us of that. Really, there’s nothing complicated about it. The federal government has infinite amounts of free money to hand out to solve every conceivable problem of the people. There are no costs, no downsides, no tradeoffs — or at least none worth mentioning. Name the issue, and the feds will create a “program” and pass out the money. We’ll “cut the cost of childcare” (i.e., the federal government will pay for it out of the infinite pile of free money). Or this:
“[M]y plan . . . includes home and long-term care, more affordable housing, pre-K for three- and four-year-olds. All of these will lower costs to families.” Or this: “We’ll build a national network of 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations.” Or this: “We’re going to provide — provide affordable high-speed Internet for every American.” And more: “Let’s increase Pell Grants; increase our historic support for HBCUs; and invest in what Jill, our First Lady, who teaches full-time, calls America’s best-kept secret: community colleges.” And on and on and on and on.
Here’s one of my favorites, just tossed in as a throwaway line: “We’re also going to . . . provide more [job] training and apprenticeships. . . .” Federal job training programs have been one of my frequent subjects at this blog over the years because there is likely no clearer example of the complete futility and waste of seemingly well-intentioned federal spending. At this post in May 2019 I traced the history of federal job training programs back to 2011. It is worthwhile quoting from that post at length:
“[T]wo plus years into the Obama administration in February 2011, GAO came out with a big report on the 47 then-existing federal job training programs with an annual cost then running about $18 billion, concluding essentially that there were no data that could establish that any of them accomplished anything positive at all (“little is known about the effectiveness of most [of these] programs”). In January 2014 President Obama, now half way into his second term, acknowledged that the existing job training programs were not succeeding ("We've got a lot of programs, but not all of them are doing what they should be doing to get people (trained) for jobs that exist right now. . . .”), and then announced in the State of the Union address that he was naming none other than VP Joe Biden to do an “across the board” review “to reform federal training programs to help make them more job-driven.” Biden got right to work, and by April 2014 had announced his proposed solution. Yes, the answer was another new program plus some new spending.”
Toward the end of the Obama administration, in 2015-16, the government conducted yet another study of the efficacy of federal job training programs, now including Biden’s additions to the mix, with something called the “Workforce Investment Act (WIA) Gold Standard Evaluation.” The study was finished in May 2016, but its release was delayed until November 8, 2016 — Election Day! (What does that tell you?) The Hill got around to summarizing the results of the study in a piece on March 17, 2017 with the headline “So far federal job training programs have been outright failures.” Excerpt:
Specifically, the study found that the programs are largely ineffective at raising participant’s earnings and are offering services that don’t meet the needs of job seekers or employers. . . . The training programs did little to raise the earnings of job seekers. The Labor Department is also supposed to offer training in high-demand occupations, and they failed there as well.
And now President Biden is proposing yet more of same. Of course he is. Probably by now he himself has completely forgotten about the 47 (or is it by now 50?) existing programs that accomplish nothing.
But job training is just a rounding error in the federal budget, used here only as an illustration of the futility that could be shown for any federal programs if one took the time to investigate. Meanwhile, there is big money, trillions, in “climate change.” Thankfully, Biden did not spend much of his SOTU promoting his “climate” agenda. But he did include this whopper:
“[L]et’s cut energy costs for families an average of $500 a year by combating climate change.”
Huh? I don’t think it’s even meaningful to apply the term “lie” to a statement this preposterous and unhinged. Multiple people have carefully explained how the intermittency of wind and solar generation impose gigantic costs as the penetration of renewable generation increases on an electrical grid. I have contributed many posts on this subject myself. These posts are based on the simple arithmetic of attempting to balance the intermittency of wind and solar generation using only batteries or other storage. No one has ever provided any refutation to the calculations. The best that can be said for Biden and his speechwriters is that they have no idea what they are talking about.
The whole idea of wind and solar electricity generation as the answer to “climate change” is headed for a spectacular fail some time in the next ten years at most. Here in New York State, the trajectory that we have been placed on by our Climate Act of 2019 is completely unrealistic and infeasible. For the country, the best we can hope for is that a few states like New York and California experience the disastrous failure before the federal government can take the whole country down at the same time. Biden is completely clueless.
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