Biden updates

Well, we dumped a trillion or so into Joe’s wish list with his alphabet laws, didn’t we.  Here’s a couple of signature pieces and how they have worked out:

Executives, officials and major investors in First Solar, the largest domestic maker of solar panels, donated at least $2 million to Democrats in 2020, including $1.5 million to Biden’s successful bid for the White House. After he won, the company spent $2.8 million more lobbying his administration and Congress, records show — an effort that included high-level meetings with top administration officials.

It has also paid massive dividends as First Solar became perhaps the biggest beneficiary of an estimated $1 trillion in environmental spending enacted under the Inflation Reduction Act, a major piece of legislation Biden signed into law in 2022 after it cleared Congress solely with Democratic votes.

Since then, First Solar’s stock price has doubled and its profits have soared thanks to new federal subsidies that could be worth as much as $10 billion over a decade.

When the Biden administration started writing rules to implement the Democrats’ new law, First Solar executives and lobbyists met at least four times in late 2022 and 2023 with administration officials, including John Podesta, who oversaw the measure’s environmental provisions. One of the more intimate gatherings was attended by Podesta, Widmar and Sloan, as well as First Solar’s contract lobbyist, Claudia James, an old friend of Podesta’s who worked for decades at a lobbying firm run by Podesta’s brother, Tony, records show.   AP

First Solar drew scrutiny back when Solyndra went under. Since then, major stockholders have become billionaires. Worth reading the article…AFTER your blood pressure meds.

Then we get to one of Joe’s original campaign promises: broadband access. Ever’body NEEDS fast internet, right?

One of President Joe Biden’s pledges upon entering office in 2021 was to expand Americans’ access to high-speed broadband internet.

Contained within the 2021 infrastructure bill, the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment (BEAD) program authorized more than $42 billion in grants, to “connect everyone in America to reliable, affordable high-speed internet by the end of the decade.”

Lots of cash there…$42,000,000,000 to put it in layman’s terms. Man, no wonder the program has been so successful – everyone has that cheap fast internet, no?  Uh, no…not one.

“In 2021, the Biden Administration got $42.45 billion from Congress to deploy high-speed Internet to millions of Americans,” Brendan Carr, the senior Republican commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), wrote in a post on X (formerly Twitter) this month. “Years later, it has not connected even 1 person with those funds. In fact, it now says that no construction projects will even start until 2025 at earliest.”

Carr blames the delay on “the addition of a substantive wish list of progressive ideas” to the approval process.

Among several examples, the senators noted that NTIA’s BEAD proposal “requires subgrantees to prioritize certain segments of the workforce, such as ‘individuals with past criminal records’ and ‘justice-impacted […] participants.'” The infrastructure law that authorized the program merely required contractors to be “in compliance with Federal labor and employment laws.”

The previous year, in a letter to Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, Republican senators warned that the NTIA’s proposed BEAD rollout “creates a complex, nine-step, ‘iterative’ structure and review process that is likely to mire State broadband offices in excessive bureaucracy and delay connecting unserved and underserved Americans as quickly as possible.”

One representative of 70 companies essentially said no one wants to work on the grant because of all the red tape added into it.

“It’s becoming clear that it might be too risky to participate in the program,” Melissa Wolf, executive director of the Minnesota Cable Communications Association, told the outlet.

Remember when someone computed – in the ’80s! – that if you just cut a check to every person and family in the country making less than the federal poverty level, a $30,000 check EACH would cost less to the government than food stamops, welfare, etc. combined?

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk approvingly reposted an X user who claimed that “for $42 billion they could have bought Starlink dishes for 140 million people.”  Reason.com

At $599 a Starlink system, that’s more like 70,000,000 people. But the principle is the same.

 

Category: "Your Tax Dollars At Work", 2024 Election, Biden