Hi Kingu,
You are certainly knowledgeable and I appreciate the updates and new info you have given me.
So much of this energy debate has centered on last years news, or even older questions that have long since been decided.
There are many kinds of subsidies and of course billions are wasted. I like the way my neighbors are doing it in Eddyville Iowa. There Indian Hills Community College is working directly with manufacturers large and small to develop new uses for corn and to train employees for working there. Of course it is a subsidy but perhaps closer linked to the real world than some.
I see that ag and chemical giant Monsanto is buying in now with their expertise and money. The big companies will dominate the ethanol production, but hundreds of small companies serving niche markets for hundreds of corn bi-products will spin off and some will make millionaires out of their owners, engineers and stock holders.
Many of these new business owners will come out of the subsidized research and training programs in the Indian Hills Community College, bolstered by their relationships, experiences and networking with the bigger companies.
We Conservative often have a knee jerk negative reaction to the word subsidy, but not all subsidies are bad or wasteful.
larry
Subsidies are wrong, period. Even if you view some of them as being good, it doesn't overcome the essential concept: The federal government is not empowered by the constitution to take money from one group and give it to another. Tax breaks, sure, I see nothing wrong with those - if the federal government has the power to tax, it should have the same power to not tax as it sees fit. But direct payments should be eliminated, period.
Look, everyone wants to see new technologies and ideas developed. But the argument to fund those should be before the local bank board, or before the board of a charity, not in a congressional office brokered over a table. The review boards of financial institutions or enterprise funds knows how to evaluate an idea, determine it's value, and assign a risk to it. A congressional flunkie doesn't.
Does this mean that some people won't have what they want? Absolutely. The constitution doesn't guarantee that you'll be bubbly with joy all your life, nor that you'll have cable television, a cell phone in your pocket, and a new car in your driveway. There is little going on in these subsidy packages that has not already been exhaustively researched in many parts of the world. Beyond, these subsidies promise nothing in return to the American people who paid for it, as indicated by your hope that some will become millionaires. Innovation has usually come from the home garage. A tinkerer who convinces someone else that they've got what it'll take to make it. That's where Apple came from, that's where Microsoft came from. Do you imagine, for a moment, that either would exist today if the government made subsidies for computer development?
Neither would exist, we'd have hundreds of competing and poorly operating systems that likely wouldn't inter-operate with each other because there wouldn't be the essential crucible of the marketplace to pare down these ideas into winning concepts.