Shrub's $50b corporate welfare plan.

[BobRossi]

So shrub says we should spend $50b over the next 10 years to break our oil addiction.
Corporate America will be the beneficiary of this money via grants and no bid contracts to major campaign contributors.

This amounts to nothing but welfare for corporate America. Yet the individual citizens of this nation are forced to fend for them selves.

Why not give that $50b back to the tax payers through incentives to purchase fuel efficient vehicles and homes?

[pstans]

1. Don't forget solar panels

Small business loans to companies and farmers to start wind and solar production.

[mrcheerful]

2. Because it wouldn't even cross shrubs mind to give tax

breaks to the middle class. It goes against trickle down economics that repukes trust so well. BTW, if you had paid attention shrub said last night he can spend us out of deficits, just make his tax cuts for the rich permanent and everything will be right back to where it was when he took office. Shrub was right, he did create millions of new jobs, in China and India. Back state side, he sold the working man out, repukes can't waste time thinking about the people back here, they have their eye on the bigger prize, world domination. Just side track americans with abortions and fear of being attacked and they stop thinking.

[Warpy]

3. 50 billion is chump change, really

when you stack it up against the largesse they lavish on the Pentagon.

Yes, this will largely be a giveaway to Big Oil, Big Agro and Big Auto in return for kickbacks to the RNC coffers. However, any energy independence will really start with grants for the research and development of alternative (renewable, we hope) energy sources. It needs to be done with a whole lot more strings than Stupid wants to put on it, though. Right now, it's a combination of welfare and campaign money laundering.

As for making the whole thing available to consumers right now, that's a little premature.

We need to pour money into things like the new, cheaper PVC technology that would offer large arrays of solar cells for a fraction of what they cost now. We need to develop TDP plants to use at landfills, producing light crude oil from toxic, seeping, stinking garbage. We need to continue research into what can be done to render nuclear waste nontoxic, and I don't mean simply burying it where it could kill somebody else 10,000 years from now. We need to continue to develop transportation that has a chance of satisfying the adolescent male ego while not squandering precious resources. All of this will have to be accomplished at the corporate level, not the single consumer level.

There's a lot to be done, but I have little hope this gang will do much that doesn't involve theft, bribery, money laundering, and kickbacks.