SolarCity and the Silver Spoon - By Marita Noon

If you own a business—maybe a taco stand, a dress shop, or an insurance agency—you know it takes a lot of hard work, good market analysis, a better product or service than your competition, and advertising. Add in a bit of luck, and you hope to grow your business—though vacant storefronts and boarded up buildings in towns and cities across America show that isn’t always enough. Each going-out-of-business sale represents the death of someone’s dream.

If, however, you are a politically favored business—say solar—your story is different. Your growth is dependent on government generosity. And, when people, who may never buy your product or use your service, balk at underwriting your venture and convince their Congressmen to take away the taxpayer largesse, like a badly behaved toddler, you threaten to take your marbles and go home—leaving former staffers unemployed and customers without service.

Such is the story of SolarCity—which has taken advantage of the favored status and bilked government programs to grow into being the nation’s largest installer of rooftop solar panels. Despite that distinction, SolarCity still loses millions of dollars. SolarCity doesn’t manufacturer solar panels—though, thanks to $750 million in funding from New York’s taxpayers—that will soon change.

Despite “major changes and growing competition in an already competitive industry,” as The Associated Press called it, Governor Andrew Cuomo is, essentially, giving SolarCity a state-owned, rent-free factory—a decision that Michael Hicks, a professor of economics and director for the Center for Business Research at Ball State University, says is “an eye-popping deal, a very questionable use of state funds, but a huge windfall for the investors of SolarCity.” In return, SolarCity promises to “create 1,460 high-tech jobs” at the Buffalo, NY, factory scheduled to begin operations late this year…..

What states have found, is that the increasing implementation of solar, results in higher costs for non-solar customers—who as the WSJ states: “tend to be lower income.”

The net-metering policies are at the center of the debate. In short, net metering compensates solar customers for the excess solar power they generate. The problem is that these individual generators get paid retail for the power, rather than the wholesale rate utilities pay for typical power supplies. As a result, customers with solar panels can completely avoid paying the utility—even though they still use power, transmission lines, and services from the company. States are seeing costs shifted from solar customers to those who can least afford it. As a result, several states, including Nevada, California, and Washington have mandated policy changes. Generally, the changes reduce the payment to wholesale and add a grid connection fee or demand fee…..

Despite being the largest installer of rooftop solar in the country, SolarCity has not been profitable—with losses of $56 million in one year and $293 million cumulatively. As more and more states look toward revising the generous solar subsidies as a way to rein in exploding costs and balance budgets, companies like SolarCity become a bad investment. When Congress extended the tax credits for solar as part of the 2015 omnibus budget deal, Solar City “saw its share price skyrocket.” The rich get richer and the poor get soaked.

Explaining the industry’s reaction to changing policy, Rep. Jeff Morris, the sponsor of proposed legislation in Washington, HB 2045, said: “The reason they are going off the rails on this is because they are afraid that it’s going to sweep across the 50 states.”

It is the state and federal incentives, not free markets, which have created a burgeoning solar industry. Congress foolishly extended the federal credits. But with “recent improvements in solar costs and efficiencies,” as Lori Christian, president of Solar Installers of Washington says: “it is time for all states to reassess the outdated incentive structure currently in place.”

When even California is proposing policy changes that would result in solar power being less-cost effective for homeowners and businesses, it is time to realize this business model has to change. And, that includes taking the silver spoon out of the mouth of SolarCity. Although they’ll likely throw a temper tantrum, take their marbles and go home, it will save taxpayers millions and force solar to operate on a level playing field like other businesses have to do.

Full Text at: http://canadafreepress.com/article/77892

The Big Short — The Sequel, Coming to a Neighborhood Near You - By Gary North

The speculator who made millions by shorting the subprime mortgage market says another crisis is now in the pipeline.

You may have seen the movie, The Big Short.

It’s going to happen again. The big bank bankers did not learn the lesson Congress wanted them to learn. Why should we expect them to? They skunked Congress — TARP. They got incredibly rich going up, and they got huge retirement settlements after it went down.

The public got no “golden parachutes.” The public got hammered.

The next crisis already in the pipeline.

Read this interview with the man who spotted the opportunity first, and who got very, very rich betting against the bankers.

When I spoke to some of the other real-life characters from The Big Short, I was surprised to hear that they thought that financial reform was pretty effective and that the system was much safer. Michael Lewis [author ofThe Big Short] disagreed. In your opinion, did the crash result in any positive changes?

Unfortunately, not many that I can see. The biggest hope I had was that we would enter a new era of personal responsibility. Instead, we doubled down on blaming others, and this is long-term tragic. Too, the crisis, incredibly, made the biggest banks bigger. And it made the Federal Reserve, an unelected body, even more powerful and therefore more relevant. The major reform legislation, Dodd-Frank, was named after two guys bought and sold by special interests, and one of them should be shouldering a good amount of blame for the crisis. Banks were forced, by the government, to save some of the worst lenders in the housing bubble, then the government turned around and pilloried the banks for the crimes of the companies they were forced to acquire. The zero interest-rate policy broke the social contract for generations of hardworking Americans who saved for retirement, only to find their savings are not nearly enough. And the interest the Federal Reserve pays on the excess reserves of lending institutions broke the money multiplier and handcuffed lending to small and midsized enterprises, where the majority of job creation and upward mobility in wages occurs. Government policies and regulations in the postcrisis era have aided the hollowing-out of middle America far more than anything the private sector has done. These changes even expanded the wealth gap by making asset owners richer at the expense of renters. Maybe there are some positive changes in there, but it seems I fail to see beyond the absurdity.

(For the full interview, click the link. Click back twice when you’re finished reading.)

Read more on nymag.com

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/01/gary-north/big-short/

Secularism is not constitutional - Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia

Justice Scalia calls out those who would suppress Christianity in the USA:

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said Saturday the idea of religious neutrality is not grounded in the country's constitutional traditions and that God has been good to the U.S. exactly because Americans honor him.

Scalia was speaking at a Catholic high school in the New Orleans suburb of Metairie, Louisiana. Scalia, who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1986 is the court's longest serving justice. He has consistently been one of the court's more conservative members.

He told the audience at Archbishop Rummel High School that there is "no place" in the country's constitutional traditions for the idea that the state must be neutral between religion and its absence.

"To tell you the truth there is no place for that in our constitutional tradition. Where did that come from?" he said. "To be sure, you can't favor one denomination over another but can't favor religion over non-religion?"

He also said there is "nothing wrong" with the idea of presidents and others invoking God in speeches. He said God has been good to America because Americans have honored him.

Scalia said during the Sept. 11 attacks he was in Rome at a conference. The next morning, after a speech by President George W. Bush in which he invoked God and asked for his blessing, Scalia said many of the other judges approached him and said they wished their presidents or prime ministers would do the same.

"God has been very good to us. That we won the revolution was extraordinary. The Battle of Midway was extraordinary. I think one of the reasons God has been good to us is that we have done him honor. Unlike the other countries of the world that do not even invoke his name we do him honor. In presidential addresses, in Thanksgiving proclamations and in many other ways," Scalia said.

"There is nothing wrong with that and do not let anybody tell you that there is anything wrong with that," he added.

Moreover, the idea that Congress shall make no law "respecting an establishment of religion" does not bar the several States, or the executive branch, from doing as it likes with regards to any religion. The fact that various courts have interpreted this as meaning that Christian football players cannot pray before a football game doesn't mean that it actually does mean that, it merely means that Christians should use their weight of numbers to do whatever they please.

The public is under no moral obligation to obey the courts. Law that is invented out of thin air can be justly ignored. Whether it can be safely ignored, of course, is another question.

Vox Popoli: Secularism is not constitutional

The Purpose of Government - By Bruce Walker

In the midst of a rancorous presidential nominating season, when we are bombarded every day with promises by politicians about how they will create jobs or educate our children better or get the economy rolling again, few if any candidates seem to grasp the purpose of government in America.  The purpose of government is to preserve liberty. 

That would include protecting us from foreign enemies who seek to take our freedom and from people who come into our nation illegally, either as illegal immigrants or as terrorists.  Protecting the legal integrity of our borders and our citizenship is an aspect of protecting American liberty.  Nothing matters, though, if liberty first is not preserved…….

Finally, consider giving teeth to the Bill of Rights, which is, of course, all about liberty.  It is from beginning to end a statement of what the federal government may not do, to us or to the governments of the states.  The Second Amendment, for example, is about preserving our individual right of self-protection.  We need to stop apologizing for exercising that right. 

The Ninth Amendment is not about allowing abortion on demand.  Hear the words of that amendment: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."  The italicized words show an intention to limit federal judicial power, which was also seen as a threat to liberty.

The sad fact, of course, is that we live in a land full of people more afraid of the responsibilities of freedom than the blessings of freedom.  Until we re-learn the purpose of government in our land, the problems we have in politics will remain intractable and politics largely an exercise in futility.

America is about liberty, and with liberty, despite the dolts who hold or seek elective office, our nation will do just fine.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/01/the_purpose_of_government.html#ixzz3w6hZE076
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The Cultural Contradictions That Have Crippled the Great American Middle Class - by Charles Hugh Smith

The decline of middle class capital is partly self-inflicted.

Conventional explorations of why the middle class is shrinking focus on economic issues such as the decline of unions and manufacturing, the increasing premiums paid to the highest-paid workers and the rising costs of higher education and healthcare.

All of these factors have a role, but few comment on the non-economic factors, specifically the values that underpin the accumulation of capital that is the one essential project of middle class households.

Daniel Bell's landmark 1976 book The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism held that"capitalism--and the culture it creates--harbors the seeds of its own downfall by creating a need among successful people for personal gratification--a need that corrodes the work ethic that led to their success in the first place."

I would phrase this in the language of values and capital:

The primary cultural contradiction of the Great American Middle Class is the disconnect between the values needed to build capital and those of gratification via debt-based consumption.

Accumulating capital--not just financial capital but human and social capital-- requires a distinct set of values and soft skills:

1. Sacrifice of current consumption in favor of accumulating capital to be invested.

2. Thrift: repairing broken items, buying used replacements, waiting for deep discounts, etc.

3. Personal integrity and trustworthiness above all else. One's word is one's bond.

4. Self-discipline/self-control in service of long-term goals and the other values.

5. Humility: there is always more to learn; pride goeth before a fall.

6. Lifelong learning: human capital is skills and experience. Adding skills and experience takes work, focus, accountability--what I call the eight essential skills in my book Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy.

7. Accumulating the social capital of emotional intelligence and trustworthy collaborators.

8. Setting and achieving long-term goals: saving enough money to buy a home or investment property with a 50% down payment, saving enough to pay for college in cash (with the student working part-time in the academic term and fulltime in summers), etc.

9. The desire to own productive assets rather than unproductive bling such as luxury vehicles or a fancy home.

10. Work-family-leisure balance: avoid burnout and maintain strong family/friends ties.

Arrayed against these capital-accumulation-disciplined values are the consumerist values of instant gratification, short-term horizons, lack of long-term goals, self-indulgence, impulse buying, keeping up with the Joneses (i.e. competitive consumption), and an obsessive focus on the social/consumption pecking order of one's peers, all of which incentivize debt-based consumption that spends future earnings today on non-essentials.

I was astonished to read in $100,000 and up is not enough – even the 'rich' live paycheck to paycheck that busy couples spend $2,000 to $2,600 per month eating out. That's roughly $30,000 a year, the equivalent of a brand-new vehicle plus a used car or one year of college--or a down payment on a rental home in a non-bubble locale.

The article contends that "Many 'rich' people have problems accepting that they aren’t really that wealthy and the money will not last forever."

This is an excellent summary of the consumerist mentality: income, wealth and financial security are all grossly over-estimated while debt is under-estimated.

Conventional Americans may wonder how recent legal immigrants with modest-paying jobs buy homes and pay off the mortgage in a few years and then send their kids to university with zero student loans. In a conventional consumerist household earning two times as much annual gross income, this is viewed as "impossible."

The point is the decline of middle class capital is partly self-inflicted. Yes, wages are stagnant, the system encourages consumption, and our self-serving politicos encourage the view that if we stop buying on credit the nation will collapse. Yes, we will experience a recession, but that is simply the order of things when debt-based consumption runs ahead of productivity. The nation will survive, and those who are prepared may finally be able to buy assets at fair-market values.

We can't change the system on our own, but we can change the way we respond to rising inequality and insecurity: we can consume/borrow our way to poverty or we can accumulate capital, skills, moxie and productive assets. Learning more valuable skills is now essentially free. What it requires is a value system that supports long-term goals, self-discipline and a desire to solve problems rather than indulge in the self-destructive pleasures of indignation.

My new book is #5 in Amazon's Kindle ebooks > Business & Money > International Economics: A Radically Beneficial World: Automation, Technology and Creating Jobs for All. The Kindle edition is $8.45, a 15% discount from its list price of $9.95.

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http://www.oftwominds.com/blogdec15/cultural-contradictions12-15.html

Cuckservative Churchianity - by Vox Day

As Red Eagle and I mentioned in Cuckservative, there is nothing that drives the modern Churchian evangelical like the desire to demonstrate that he is not racist:

When Michelle Higgins addressed a gathering of 16,000 evangelical students meeting in St. Louis this week for a missions conference, she brought the same intensity and fervor she’s often displayed as a leader of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Ms. Higgins, a St. Louis native and director of Faith for Justice, a protest group devoted to “Biblical activism,” minced no words when she told the crowd what happened after Michael Brown was killed last year in Ferguson, Mo.

“When I first heard that our brother had been killed, we began looking for churches to host discussion groups,” said Higgins, also the director of worship and outreach at a local congregation. “All of our evangelical partners said, 'We’re not ready to talk about race and justice; we’re not ready to talk about police brutality and mass incarceration; we’re not ready to talk about the fact that black bodies are grotesque to us – we don’t want to admit that.' ”

Her provocative words at the 2015 Urbana conference, a student gathering co-hosted by the conservative campus ministry InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, not only laid bare some of the deep racial divisions in the United States after the killings of Mr. Brown and other black men over the past year and half, but they also went directly to the fact that, as a whole, evangelical Christians remain among the least likely to have sympathy for the Black Lives Matter movement.

But at the Urbana conference this week, many evangelical student leaders and others have expressed full solidarity with the emergence of the protest movement. Worship leaders onstage, a diverse group leading worship with the kind of praise music that many evangelical churches are known for, wore Black Lives Matter T-shirts and sang songs in Spanish, French, Korean, and Swahili, as well as English.

Those "evangelical student leaders" are pure SJW entryists. Any church that accepts them into leadership will be led astray. Whatever it is they worship, it isn't the God of the Holy Bible. And whomever it is they follow, it assuredly isn't Jesus Christ.

Here is a reliable heuristic for the Christian: if a fallen world lauds you for what you are doing, the chances are very good that what you are doing isn't in line with the Will of God as expressed in the Scriptures.

Vox Popoli: Cuckservative Churchianity

http://news.yahoo.com/college-evangelicals-embrace-unlikely-cause-black-lives-matter-165255822.html?soc_src=mail&soc_trk=ma

Happy New Year! – Are you serious? After reading this blog archive?

Even if you read just a fraction of the posts on this site, it becomes fairly obvious that there are some issues which confront us as a nation this coming year and beyond. Often, a sense of helplessness can overwhelm our system of coping with events that clearly are beyond our individual control. So what to do?

If you somehow stumbled onto this blog site and are wondering what is going on here – let me give you some quick pointers.

The contents on most blog sites are usually written by the blogger or a group of bloggers, many of whom are good writers. I claim no great writing skills. In fact, I learn more from others and have done so now for well over 10 years. What I often lacked was the ability to quickly retrieve something I remembered from months past, so – why not build an archive of related material written by the best in the business – and that is exactly what this site is all about. The articles are categorized roughly by topic and are word searchable – I use it almost daily in my conversations on line. All are fully credited to the authors.

As to the overall purpose of my internet presence, if you have not yet visited my website home at - www.crushlimbraw.com – I urge you to do so. It requires some reading time, especially the full text of referenced articles by other authors.

The basic bottom line action I propose is that we must all become mentors. Mentoring is a process for the informal transmission of knowledge, social capital, and the psychosocial support perceived by the recipient as relevant to work, career, or professional development; mentoring entails informal communication, usually face-to-face and during a sustained period of time, between a person who is perceived to have greater relevant knowledge, wisdom, or experience (the mentor) and a person who is perceived to have less (the protégé)".

Obviously, the mentor has to stay ahead of those mentored, and thus the purpose of this archival blog.

Finally, an observation – what I observe most of all with most people of all political stripes is the fact that they are usually ‘fighting the last war’ from their perspective. That ‘war’ ended long ago – the situation has changed – but they’re still stuck in a time warp of their own making. By some ‘magic stroke’ they decided some time ago that they ‘now know daTruth’ and therefore nothing else can change that. That is the perfect formula to become delusional and lose a sense for reality. For us imperfect human beings – truth is a process, not an end state.

I wish you well, but it’s better to be prepared! - CL