Governor Gregoire got re-elected by a much smaller majority than President Obama was elected; coat-tails carried her through. Not to mention her repeated campaigning on a platform of not raising taxes...
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Previous Governors, including Gary Locke (current Secretary of Commerce) were able to address budget shortfalls by first cutting where possible, then sitting down with both parties and hammering out the plan. The last time we faced a big deficit then Senate minority leader Dino Rossi (Gregoire's opponent in 2004 and 2008) worked the plan with Governor Locke. And they also created the rainy day fund.
The responsible action would have been to do what Locke and his predecessors did - not allow spending to explode, not allow the Legislature to raid trust funds, to actually lead in a fiscal manner and use the power of the veto. Apparently Gregoire is incapable of saying no to spending bills...
As far as logical discipline, I guess in your book blowing your budget by 40% over 5 years - and financing that increase by willingly spending your savings, spending the pension trust funds, spending class action settlements on items they were not designated for - is fiscally sound. I guess it makes great class warfare which is what you explicitly are doing.
It's obvious you don't have a clear understanding of Washington State Government. And you really dig that class warfare thing, which is exactly what is happening in Washington. Except it's the upper class liberal spenders in King County that are responsible for the blown budget, not the poorer communities outside of Puget Sound (those communities that overwhelmingly voted against Governor Gregoire).
We're getting the budget and spending that the rich and affluent want; we're not getting what the vast majority of the "impoverished working class" want. There's nearly a 100% correlation between votes for Gregoire and wealth. Rich Seattle and the suburbs put her in office, poor SW and Eastern WA voted against her. They realize their jobs rely upon strong businesses and the money spent by those well-paid employees of those strong businesses.
They see what happens when Boeing moved out, it wasn't just the few thousand jobs that left it was the 10,000 jobs lost at the restaurants, oil change facilities, shopping malls, and such. We see it is going to happen again as WA puts the screws to Microsoft now, too... Microsoft will relocate its operations and its expansion outside of WA, and those new MS jobs will not be around to support the lower wage earners.
Your pre-conceived notion of the fat-cats and rich demanding we back off of MS is completely backwards; it's the rich coddled in King County that want to keep increasing spending on bike paths and green belts and light-rail through no-where and to no-where. The working class, blue-collar overwhelmingly oppose this, but in our State they simply don't carry enough votes.
But then that reality doesn't play well with your anti-corporate, class-warfare screed, does it?
Parent marries two flawed ideas that don't belong together and then somehow calls this a justification.
1. Local Government is somehow a spendthrift. This is a Sarah Palin explanation. The people with little comprehension of what their government does whip this explanation out to beat down their enemies. My civics class from grammar school taught me that local government provides public services and infrastructure. You know those awful spendthrifts just wasting our taxes on roads, and sewage systems... Let's do away with law enforcement. Courts too. People that use this kind of thinking have one goal, a return of the truck system. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truck_system
In the last 5 years, the State budget has exploded by 40%. Governor Christine Gregoire expanded the budget by 33% in her first 4 year term, and has kept on this pace for her current term (re-elected for her second term in November 2008).
As the grandparent posted, in this case it IS the State living way outside their means, exploding spending completely out-of-whack with the economy and people of the State of Washington. We've blown through a billion dollar rainy-day fund, raided State pension funds for several billion dollars, spent every penny of the $4 billion tobacco settlement, and it's still not enough. It IS the spending, not the tax breaks to Microsoft...
Seriously, in the last 5 years State spending has grown by 40%. The State's shortfall isn't from giving Microsoft or other mega-employers (those who employ 100,000+ in the State) tax breaks; it's from growing spending at an insane rate way beyond inflation plus population growth PLUS state GDP growth.
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But class warfare is always a good way for the politicians to shirk their responsibility for the financial meltdown of WA State... Blame the MegaCorps, not the budget-busting increases we've seen over the last 5 years...
I use my Livescribe, too, in the corporate world. Pen and paper, instant sketches, others can quickly annotate my drawings right there. Works anywhere, and being able to sync audio with the writing is beyond belief helpful. Highly recommended for any student or professional who needs to take notes!
Ummm, how much power do we get from nuclear as from wind? Remember, electrically generated wind had a 60 YEAR head start! And on a per-MWh basis we know that wind gets ~15 TIMES the subsidy of nuclear.
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And if you READ THE QUOTE I made, you'd see it comes from the CBO, a non-partisan division of Congress, and if you believe it is partisan, well, it came from a CBO report after the Democrats (no friends of nuclear) controlled Congress for a year and a half.
In 2008 the Congressional Budget Office estimated the value of the subsidy at only $600,000 per reactor per year.
So $600,000 per reactor per year will break the industry, make it completely untenable in terms of cost. Consider the average reactor is 1 GWh capable, that's about $0.0000685 per kWh - less than 7 thousandths of a cent per kWh. Seems that wind is getting a LOT more than that!
You made the claim that insurance was way too low and thus "subsidizing" the nuclear industry; it's your responsibility to back it up with something other than a single unsubstantiated reference.
From the article you linked, the opening statement:
A total of up to 4000 people could eventually die of radiation exposure from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant (NPP) accident nearly 20 years ago, an international team of more than 100 scientists has concluded.
As of mid-2005, however, fewer than 50 deaths had been directly attributed to radiation from the disaster, almost all being highly exposed rescue workers, many who died within months of the accident but others who died as late as 2004.
Emphasis added. Yes, thousands of deaths COULD happen. The reality appears to be radically different, however (less than 50, and almost all from the first responders to that catastrophe).
I guess we can play that game. Tens of thousands can be drowned when dams burst. Hundreds of thousands could be killed from lung damage from breathing the caustic fumes from manufacturing of solar panels. Millions COULD be killed when turbine blades snap off and decapitate truckers carrying loads of chlorine gas... I guess hypotheticals are now the standard?
And you ignore the FACTS about the costs of delivered power - I notice you never want to say you are wrong. Wrong about the "catch up time" needed by wind (when it, in fact, had a 70 year head start). Wrong about the "lower cost" of wind (the most skewed numbers you can find put it at close to equal, and back up the FACTS about the 15 times higher subsidy for wind relative to nuclear). Wrong about the costs of insurance (completely unsubstantiated numbers, found in one article, stated as fact with no backing). Oh well, I think this thread has run its course...
Nuclear generates power for $0.04 to $0.08 per kWh (per your own sources). At BEST, wind can get down to $0.05 per kWh but that's with heavy subsidies.
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And you keep talking about insurance, yet have not provided any substantive reference to the costs of such insurance. A single report referencing an unsubstantiated claim.
What about the insurance subsidies for wind? The property taxes (that are usually waived - subsidy - here in the US)? The need for 80% to 100% replacement base-load systems (typically coal or natural gas)?
You want to know why utilities are not flocking to wind? Because it simply costs too much, and requires too much on-going costs to support. It's a 110+ year old technology (electrical power generation via windmills) and it's not used because there are lower cost alternatives that require less subsidies.
If nuclear power plant operator would have to insure itself against an atomic accident with billion-damage, the calculation would shift clearly to favour of the renewable ones
Again, that's an unsubstantiated claim. It's stated and that's that - nothing to back it up, no references, no numbers, nothing. Just a statement. Hardly something to base your argument on.
'Now, state-of-the-art wind power plants can generate electricity for less than 5 cents/kWh with the Production Tax Credit in ma' that's 5 + 1.5 cents in subsidy, that's 6.5 cents tops without the subsidy.
From your own link:
The PTC is adjusted annually for inflation, and stood at 1.8 cents/kWh as of December 2003
Based on inflation, it's over $0.02/kWh right now, and climbing. That's $20/MWh, while nuclear is down around $1.59/MWh (The Department of Energy numbers I referenced, see reference in a previous post, put wind at $23.37 and nuclear at $1.59 per MWh - your own numbers are right in line with wind, I see no reason that nuclear would be off).
Nuclear simply has more capacity, more consistency, and lower costs. Nothing you've posted here has shown otherwise, and in fact your own sources back up the numbers I've posted (for example, the subsidies required). Wind is a fun diversion, but it's never paid off even though it is a much older and mature technology.
Their numbers come from here, which itself is unsubstantiated. Just claimed, no backing data. And that page also opens with (loosely translated):
A nuclear power plant produces the kilowatt hour (kWh) for 4 to 6 cents. This is cheaper than almost all renewable sources. Water, electricity costs 3 to 12 cents per kWh, wind 8 to 26 cents, from 15 to 70 cents biomass, photovoltaics even more. Therefore, the electricity industry is the great need for nuclear power, because it was "the most economically advantageous solution.
Meaning that even if we accept the unsubstantiated claim of $0.04 to $0.08 per kWhr nuclear is still at the bottom range of what wind could ever be, making nuclear at worst equal to the costs of wind at the best. And nuclear is still continuous, longer lifespan than 20 years, and a base-load capable source.
Yet we still have to subsidize them at a rate 15 times that of nuclear. A more mature technology that requires massively more subsidies simply isn't a viable option.
"Big Oil" is being subsidized considerably LESS than the alternative energy sources like wind and solar; natural gas and petroleum liquids are subsidized at a rate of $0.25 per MWhr while wind is subsidized at $23.37 per MWhr and solar at $24.34 per MWhr, meaning we spend nearly 100 times as much on subsidies of wind and solar as we do on "Big Oil" if you look at it on a per MWhr basis.
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Additionally, companies like the dreaded ExxonMobil pay nearly $3 in taxes for every dollar of net profit; they pay more than $100 billion a year in taxes - more than all capital gains taxes collected. And in 2007 ExxonMobil alone paid nearly 16 TIMES more in taxes than the Department of Energy spent on all subsidies combined. That $227 million in total subsidies to Big Oil pales in comparison to the $116 billion in taxes paid by ExxonMobil alone, let alone the other oil companies.
Big Oil is paying its fair share; is little wind or little solar doing so?
For widely dispersed populations where the cost of transmission lines per user are high then distributed wind may make sense; as a base-load or substantial portion of a high-density energy system, however, wind is more expensive, less consistent, and require more maintenance and replacement than the alternatives.
The Mercury Grand Marquis I rented 4 weeks ago to made the trip from Los Angeles International Airport (Thrifty Car Rental) Las Vegas International Airport - a distance of 281 miles - in 3 hours, 7 minutes, an average speed of just over 90 MPH (with several stints - such as Victorville, CA to Barstow, CA, and Baker, CA to Jean, NV - in the 100-105 MPH range). Averaged 22.2 MPG based upon the on-board computer. That car just sips the fuel (beyond 25 MPG) when you're cruising at 85 MPH. The mileage was below 20 MPG until I cleared San Dimas and traffic opened up. As the speed increased, the mileage jumped dramatically.
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Gearing and volumetric efficiency of the engine play a huge part in highway speed mileage. Some cars really do get better mileage at higher speeds because of those effects. I usually rent this model of car when in SoCal/Nevada because of the comfort over long stretches, the ability to take 3-5 people with me, tons of luggage space (or, in my case, demo products for CES and NAMM) and the great mileage on LONG highway runs. Add in the 19 gallon tank and you can get 400+ miles on the highway before having to refuel.
And when you rent a white or dark blue one, people tend to get out of your way when you come up behind them, since the only people who actually buy such cars are either retirees who putter along at 50 MPH or police who typically patrol that stretch of road at 80-90 MPH speeds (for those not familiar with the LA-LV road, the speed of traffic is typically 75-80 MPH, with a good 30-35% of the traffic moving at 90 MPH).
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Previous Governors, including Gary Locke (current Secretary of Commerce) were able to address budget shortfalls by first cutting where possible, then sitting down with both parties and hammering out the plan. The last time we faced a big deficit then Senate minority leader Dino Rossi (Gregoire's opponent in 2004 and 2008) worked the plan with Governor Locke. And they also created the rainy day fund.
The responsible action would have been to do what Locke and his predecessors did - not allow spending to explode, not allow the Legislature to raid trust funds, to actually lead in a fiscal manner and use the power of the veto. Apparently Gregoire is incapable of saying no to spending bills...
As far as logical discipline, I guess in your book blowing your budget by 40% over 5 years - and financing that increase by willingly spending your savings, spending the pension trust funds, spending class action settlements on items they were not designated for - is fiscally sound. I guess it makes great class warfare which is what you explicitly are doing.
It's obvious you don't have a clear understanding of Washington State Government. And you really dig that class warfare thing, which is exactly what is happening in Washington. Except it's the upper class liberal spenders in King County that are responsible for the blown budget, not the poorer communities outside of Puget Sound (those communities that overwhelmingly voted against Governor Gregoire).
We're getting the budget and spending that the rich and affluent want; we're not getting what the vast majority of the "impoverished working class" want. There's nearly a 100% correlation between votes for Gregoire and wealth. Rich Seattle and the suburbs put her in office, poor SW and Eastern WA voted against her. They realize their jobs rely upon strong businesses and the money spent by those well-paid employees of those strong businesses.
They see what happens when Boeing moved out, it wasn't just the few thousand jobs that left it was the 10,000 jobs lost at the restaurants, oil change facilities, shopping malls, and such. We see it is going to happen again as WA puts the screws to Microsoft now, too... Microsoft will relocate its operations and its expansion outside of WA, and those new MS jobs will not be around to support the lower wage earners.
Your pre-conceived notion of the fat-cats and rich demanding we back off of MS is completely backwards; it's the rich coddled in King County that want to keep increasing spending on bike paths and green belts and light-rail through no-where and to no-where. The working class, blue-collar overwhelmingly oppose this, but in our State they simply don't carry enough votes.
But then that reality doesn't play well with your anti-corporate, class-warfare screed, does it?
Parent marries two flawed ideas that don't belong together and then somehow calls this a justification.
1. Local Government is somehow a spendthrift. This is a Sarah Palin explanation. The people with little comprehension of what their government does whip this explanation out to beat down their enemies. My civics class from grammar school taught me that local government provides public services and infrastructure. You know those awful spendthrifts just wasting our taxes on roads, and sewage systems... Let's do away with law enforcement. Courts too. People that use this kind of thinking have one goal, a return of the truck system. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truck_system
In the last 5 years, the State budget has exploded by 40%. Governor Christine Gregoire expanded the budget by 33% in her first 4 year term, and has kept on this pace for her current term (re-elected for her second term in November 2008).
As the grandparent posted, in this case it IS the State living way outside their means, exploding spending completely out-of-whack with the economy and people of the State of Washington. We've blown through a billion dollar rainy-day fund, raided State pension funds for several billion dollars, spent every penny of the $4 billion tobacco settlement, and it's still not enough. It IS the spending, not the tax breaks to Microsoft...
But class warfare is always a good way for the politicians to shirk their responsibility for the financial meltdown of WA State... Blame the MegaCorps, not the budget-busting increases we've seen over the last 5 years...
Hmmm... My Livescribe came with a little USB cradle for charging and connecting to my laptop. Makes syncing a "plug and play" operation.
I use my Livescribe, too, in the corporate world. Pen and paper, instant sketches, others can quickly annotate my drawings right there. Works anywhere, and being able to sync audio with the writing is beyond belief helpful. Highly recommended for any student or professional who needs to take notes!
And if you READ THE QUOTE I made, you'd see it comes from the CBO, a non-partisan division of Congress, and if you believe it is partisan, well, it came from a CBO report after the Democrats (no friends of nuclear) controlled Congress for a year and a half.
Logic isn't your strong suit, I'm out of here...
In 2008 the Congressional Budget Office estimated the value of the subsidy at only $600,000 per reactor per year.
So $600,000 per reactor per year will break the industry, make it completely untenable in terms of cost. Consider the average reactor is 1 GWh capable, that's about $0.0000685 per kWh - less than 7 thousandths of a cent per kWh. Seems that wind is getting a LOT more than that!
Last I heard, at least here in the US, a jury is a group of 12, so unless all of your personalities qualified as the jury, you won't be in solitary...
You made the claim that insurance was way too low and thus "subsidizing" the nuclear industry; it's your responsibility to back it up with something other than a single unsubstantiated reference.
A total of up to 4000 people could eventually die of radiation exposure from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant (NPP) accident nearly 20 years ago, an international team of more than 100 scientists has concluded.
As of mid-2005, however, fewer than 50 deaths had been directly attributed to radiation from the disaster, almost all being highly exposed rescue workers, many who died within months of the accident but others who died as late as 2004.
Emphasis added. Yes, thousands of deaths COULD happen. The reality appears to be radically different, however (less than 50, and almost all from the first responders to that catastrophe).
I guess we can play that game. Tens of thousands can be drowned when dams burst. Hundreds of thousands could be killed from lung damage from breathing the caustic fumes from manufacturing of solar panels. Millions COULD be killed when turbine blades snap off and decapitate truckers carrying loads of chlorine gas... I guess hypotheticals are now the standard?
And you ignore the FACTS about the costs of delivered power - I notice you never want to say you are wrong. Wrong about the "catch up time" needed by wind (when it, in fact, had a 70 year head start). Wrong about the "lower cost" of wind (the most skewed numbers you can find put it at close to equal, and back up the FACTS about the 15 times higher subsidy for wind relative to nuclear). Wrong about the costs of insurance (completely unsubstantiated numbers, found in one article, stated as fact with no backing). Oh well, I think this thread has run its course...
And you keep talking about insurance, yet have not provided any substantive reference to the costs of such insurance. A single report referencing an unsubstantiated claim.
What about the insurance subsidies for wind? The property taxes (that are usually waived - subsidy - here in the US)? The need for 80% to 100% replacement base-load systems (typically coal or natural gas)?
You want to know why utilities are not flocking to wind? Because it simply costs too much, and requires too much on-going costs to support. It's a 110+ year old technology (electrical power generation via windmills) and it's not used because there are lower cost alternatives that require less subsidies.
If nuclear power plant operator would have to insure itself against an atomic accident with billion-damage, the calculation would shift clearly to favour of the renewable ones
Again, that's an unsubstantiated claim. It's stated and that's that - nothing to back it up, no references, no numbers, nothing. Just a statement. Hardly something to base your argument on.
'Now, state-of-the-art wind power plants can generate electricity for less than 5 cents/kWh with the Production Tax Credit in ma' that's 5 + 1.5 cents in subsidy, that's 6.5 cents tops without the subsidy.
From your own link:
The PTC is adjusted annually for inflation, and stood at 1.8 cents/kWh as of December 2003
Based on inflation, it's over $0.02/kWh right now, and climbing. That's $20/MWh, while nuclear is down around $1.59/MWh (The Department of Energy numbers I referenced, see reference in a previous post, put wind at $23.37 and nuclear at $1.59 per MWh - your own numbers are right in line with wind, I see no reason that nuclear would be off).
Nuclear simply has more capacity, more consistency, and lower costs. Nothing you've posted here has shown otherwise, and in fact your own sources back up the numbers I've posted (for example, the subsidies required). Wind is a fun diversion, but it's never paid off even though it is a much older and mature technology.
A nuclear power plant produces the kilowatt hour (kWh) for 4 to 6 cents. This is cheaper than almost all renewable sources. Water, electricity costs 3 to 12 cents per kWh, wind 8 to 26 cents, from 15 to 70 cents biomass, photovoltaics even more. Therefore, the electricity industry is the great need for nuclear power, because it was "the most economically advantageous solution.
Meaning that even if we accept the unsubstantiated claim of $0.04 to $0.08 per kWhr nuclear is still at the bottom range of what wind could ever be, making nuclear at worst equal to the costs of wind at the best. And nuclear is still continuous, longer lifespan than 20 years, and a base-load capable source.
Source please?
Not sure where you're getting $72 billion a year, when the report linked shows under $7 billion for ALL subsidies including wind and solar...
Yet we still have to subsidize them at a rate 15 times that of nuclear. A more mature technology that requires massively more subsidies simply isn't a viable option.
It's OK to admit your contention was wrong, no harm no foul. Most consider it a sign of maturity and a critical, logical mind.
Windpower is a relatively new technology, so it deserves some time to catch up.
Yes, by all means a technology around since the 9th century certainly deserves a chance to catch up to something that has existed since 1942. I guess an 1100 year head-start isn't enough?
Additionally, companies like the dreaded ExxonMobil pay nearly $3 in taxes for every dollar of net profit; they pay more than $100 billion a year in taxes - more than all capital gains taxes collected. And in 2007 ExxonMobil alone paid nearly 16 TIMES more in taxes than the Department of Energy spent on all subsidies combined. That $227 million in total subsidies to Big Oil pales in comparison to the $116 billion in taxes paid by ExxonMobil alone, let alone the other oil companies.
Big Oil is paying its fair share; is little wind or little solar doing so?
Windmills have a 20 year lifespan meaning they tend to last 1/2 to 1/4 the time of other alternative power generation systems.
Not to mention that wind power is subsidized at a rate nearly 15 times nuclear. We're subsidizing wind at a rate of $23.37 per MWhr, and nuclear at $1.59 per MWhr. Coal is at $0.44 per MWhr and natural gas is just $0.25 per MWhr.
For widely dispersed populations where the cost of transmission lines per user are high then distributed wind may make sense; as a base-load or substantial portion of a high-density energy system, however, wind is more expensive, less consistent, and require more maintenance and replacement than the alternatives.
The strength of your argument is overwhelming...
Gearing and volumetric efficiency of the engine play a huge part in highway speed mileage. Some cars really do get better mileage at higher speeds because of those effects. I usually rent this model of car when in SoCal/Nevada because of the comfort over long stretches, the ability to take 3-5 people with me, tons of luggage space (or, in my case, demo products for CES and NAMM) and the great mileage on LONG highway runs. Add in the 19 gallon tank and you can get 400+ miles on the highway before having to refuel.
And when you rent a white or dark blue one, people tend to get out of your way when you come up behind them, since the only people who actually buy such cars are either retirees who putter along at 50 MPH or police who typically patrol that stretch of road at 80-90 MPH speeds (for those not familiar with the LA-LV road, the speed of traffic is typically 75-80 MPH, with a good 30-35% of the traffic moving at 90 MPH).
The Intel® I've gathered says otherwise...
Then you're not trying hard enough. Ask your mistress how to keep a girlfriend on the side, they usually have good ideas about that...
I like those things too, which is why I pay my property taxes (which fund those tasks). All those local amenities are taxed at the local level...