Of course, over time, we'll all be dead.
According to Payne, under his group's most optimistic estimates, the cost of electricity would start going down in 2020. Under a slightly more pessimistic projection, it could be more like 2030. By which time, the average customer would be saving a whopping 34 cents a month. That's after paying as much as a buck a month more for those intervening years.
Here's one of the cardinal rules of politics:
Whenever anyone promises that if you vote a certain way, you'll pay more in the short term, but less in the long term, they're always at least half wrong. Unfortunately, that's likely to be the long-term half. Just ask the folks who've allowed wind farms in their towns how much their property taxes have gone down. Or their electric bills. Check with drivers who've been forced to buy expensive ethanol-laced gasoline that they were taxed on in the first place to pay for production subsidies.
Affordable alternative energy is a lovely idea. Particularly, if you're in the business of selling the equipment it requires or building the facilities to produce it or marketing this scam to an unwary public that's inclined to believe the basic principles of economics have been suspended by little solar-powered fairies.
Otherwise, it's not so lovely.
Trying to artificially alter the electricity market through the referendum process won't create real jobs — or cheap power — because once you've finished constructing all the windmills it'll take to get us to the 20 percent mark, there'll be nothing more for those workers to do.
Except go in search of understaffed antique shops looking for government- subsidized employees.
If you really want to save on your electric bill, you could not bother to email your criticisms to me at aldiamon@herniahill.net.
