New Onion

Government misses the point. Spends millions to save thousands. Shows utter inability to invest our money wisely. Again.

The Solar Photovoltaic Rebate Initiative, which launched yesterday, will offer residents a rebate of up to $5,000 for the instillation of solar panels.

Rebates are offered at $1 per watt up to a limit of 5,000 watts, or five kilowatts, per home.

A single solar panel can produce more than 300 watts from sunlight.

The Department of Energy spokesperson said that initiative will continue until the funding, $500,000 according to the 2009/2010 Budget, runs out.

The spokesperson said: “The subsidy programme is designed to encourage hundreds of homeowners to install photovoltaic systems on their property and to stimulate the local solar instillation market.”

Great, right?

Not so much. They’re spending half a million dollars ($7.36 per resident) to subsidize the solar electric industry… With current technology solar electric systems produce small amounts of power at huge cost. Meanwhile, solar water heaters pay for themselves right now, today.

In short – spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to save thousands of dollars of electricity when there are options that allow one to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to save hundreds of thousands of dollars of electricity.

Terrible cost/benefit. Terrible use of our money.

Typical.

Thanks for Johnnystar for mentioning that I’ve posted again… for the record, I have no involvement with any party but recently have been making overtures toward the Gombey Liberation Party.

I believe there are a number of truisms that will be a part of Bermuda politics.
1. White people will never vote for the PLP in large numbers because the PLP accepts and promotes anti-white rhetoric (Walter Rhoban’s e-mails, “plantation” rhetoric, and “they want to luck us all up.)
2. Any party that challenges the PLP will therefore attract the white vote.

If the new party cannot very quickly attract and retain some very powerful black voices to counter the PLP spin with strong talking points then it too will be branded “white”.

*tap tap tap*

Is this thing on?

Dennis Pitcher of 21square.com gets it:

I see these closures as a reflection of a greater sense of disillusionment which has grown in the community towards politics, not simply the UBP. Far too many people are perpetually stuck in this rut of us vs. them which shows no sign of abating. There is this refusal by many to accept that people could genuninely care about our future and instead most any criticism or deviation from the incumbent party line must be the result of a personal vendetta against the party, not a desire for positive change for all Bermudians. Thus, is it any surprise people wake up and question what the value of being involved in politics at all?

The present financial crisis is a good example. Those in the know have been blowing a horn of warning for quite some time now that we could be headed for dire straights. Yet these calls have continually fallen under the guise of scaremongering and a personal vendetta against the PLP rather than a genuine concern for the future of our island. Thus, one begins to wonder if there is even a point in trying to sound the horn if it falls on deaf ears. Instead, the question does rise as to when does one give up on trying to save those who do not want to be saved and focus on saving one’s self?

From the position of this writer alone, Bermuda is in a very scary position right now that should warrant concern. Concerns which have been raised numerous times for quite some time but have fallen on deaf ears.

Noteablely we should be weary of and should have been weary of:
- the credit crisis
- the potential for legislative changes to US tax law
- the abrupt ending of the construction boom due to the combination of a flood of new office space combined with businesses who are on-shoring back office operations
- the drying up of credit for hotel/construction projects
- the overzealous budget which gives us little to no breathing room
- the horrible savings/lending ratio that banks have been allowed to have which could have caused a housing bubble that may soon pop

These are all things I’ve been thinking of writing about, yet while I used to rush to hammer out long pieces in hopes of convincing people that we should be weary, these days I simply don’t have the motivation. My own blog may not yet have been announced as dead, but for all intensive purposes it remains domant in comparison to what it once was.

Politics.bm appears to have gone the way of LimeyinBermuda.com and I’m pretty much done too. Vexedbermoothes.com is doing a better job than I could anyway.

Getting to say “I told you so.” is not satisfying. Oh well, I did my best.

Thanks for reading.

Good luck and good night.

After my recent posts of relative skepticism about the Bermuda real estate market I think it’s worth outlining the bull case for Bermuda real estate. It can be located right here: Royal Gazette Employment Classifieds.

As long as the government continues to allow population growth then Bermuda’s economy will continue to grow largely independent of the rest of the world, and despite poor government (really terrible government could still cause a local recession/depression). However this population growth fuels the decline in standards of living as more of us are packed into condos/human filing cabinets, and spend more of our lives sitting in traffic. This population growth also shields government from responsibility and side effects of having a government producing large numbers of (mostly black, mostly male) people who are only employed because we are building as fast as we can to provide housing for the growing population, so as long as the government continues to keep the demand side for housing growing by allowing net immigration, and as long as they continue to artificially constrain the supply side through incompetent management of urban planning and building control, then we should see prices remain firm.

Of course, we are building a social house of cards by leaving the lower income Bermudians chronically under-housed, and by keeping prices and rents high are transferring wealth from the young and poor to older (mostly white) home owners.

Anyone who claims the PLP is the party of “social justice” is clueless.

For the record – the real slowdown is just beginning.

From the New York Times:

Some suggest that the banks, spooked by enormous losses, have replaced a disastrously indiscriminate willingness to hand out money with an equally arbitrary aversion to lend — even on industries that continue to grow.

Some have suggested that Ewart Brown is a remarkable alchemist for his ability to make a Platinum era in tourism (he picked occupancy numbers from the week of the Newport Bermuda Race) from tourism numbers that most would consider to be more Talc than anything. I expect that if Brown continues to work his magic in tourism and if the US slowdown becomes a truly widespread credit bust then we could soon be in the “Peat” period of tourism. The only thing that will prevent that is if the government decides to use the taxpayers to subsidize large capital investments in tourism for the benefit of private developers… like the Southlands/Morgan’s Point giveaway and the Club Med giveaway. Either way, the people of Bermuda get screwed.

An interesting article in the paper today: Car sales concerns.

With car sales dropping 24 percent in May alone, dealerships said it was hard not to notice a lack of customers.

This is not only an indication of economic weakness, but it’s also going to show up somewhere else where it hurts. The government takes a large tax on every car sold. Fewer sales means less tax revenue.

Since our government has presided over massive increase in spending which have not been fatal thanks to almost matching gains in tax revenue, we can expect nothing good from the combination of poor financial control, economic slowdown, and a Finance Minister who would have been fired if she was a company CFO.

Edit: Changed the link from a duplicate of the car sales story to Bob Richards’ response to the audit.

Since Bermuda’s government is picking up on the American right-wing’s penchant for outsourcing of government functions it’s probably worth it to start asking the question: Are government contractors more efficient than the civil service?

From the Wall Street Journal opinion section a somewhat slanted view:

One fact about government outsourcing is settled: It sure doesn’t save money. A Washington Post reporter who scrutinized Katrina reconstruction contracts in 2006 found that “the difference between the job’s actual price and the fee charged to taxpayers ranged from 40 percent to as high as 1,700 percent.” To cover damaged roofs with tarps, certain contractors billed the government $1.50 per square foot of roof covered; some of the people who actually did the work got under 10 cents per square foot. Guess who kept the difference.

The issue in my books are incentives – what are the incentives we create when we contract out government functions?