America gets the government it wants to pay for

 

Today's post will be short and sweet.  Around 10:45 am, I called Social Security to see about having Federal Taxes withheld from my monthly payments.  One problem - they do not have enough staff available to man their phone lines.  As a result, people can be kept on hold for over an hour.

Normally, I would find waiting 60+ minutes to reach a human inexcusable.  At least, SSA has a system where they will call a person back on the same number from which they made the original call.  Yet, I find this a little off-putting, and quite understandable given how many Americans think of the role of government and its funding.  

Americans like to think that we can get good things by paying prices for items that "fall off the back of the truck."  This helps to explain why government does so many things and does them in a half-assed way. It is much easier to say that we fund a wide range of services than to say that we fund none of them particularly well.  For example, let's talk about Social Security.  We charge employers and employees 7.5% of each employee's salary to fund future retirement benefits.  Yet, by 2040, the Social Security Trust Fund will run out of money, and benefits will need to be cut by 20%.  Instead of explaining to the public that longer lives require that we put more into the trust fund to pay for longer retirements, we keep passing the buck into the future as if we will get something for nothing.  So, we will likely find ourselves getting benefit cuts when we need them most.

At the end of WW2, the United States found itself as the dominant super power.  We invested in global military superiority for the sake of our prosperity - by fostering peaceful trade with our currency being the world's exchange standard, we could buy things cheaper than if another country's currency was the exchange standard of choice.  Yes, we made the mistake of exporting production to countries where labor was cheaper than in the US.  But we were able to maintain a standard of living as long as the domestic job market kept growing.  Unfortunately, it did - but in ways that didn't benefit the American worker.  Part time jobs without benefits became the norm, and both our government and its citizens started living on credit.

Sooner or later, we will have to pay the bill for borrowing more than we can afford.  Hopefully, our children and grandchildren will be able to do so.

It feels like summer already, and that won't officially be here for two months.

 

It's April, and I've already have had to turn on my air conditioner twice. As I write this, it hit 90° today, and it will be the same tomorrow. Although this is only anecdotal evidence of global warning, I can't help but believe that global warming is real and taking place right now.

But why do I mention this?

I live in an apartment that gets very warm.  During the winter, I've often have had to open windows to make this place comfortable.  During the summer, the air conditioner is on 24x7.  And it's been this way since I bought this place.  As the nation shifts to greater use of electricity for cooking, heating, and transportation, I see major problems with the transformation to a future with reduced dependency on fossil fuels.

The first problem I see is the generation of enough electricity to meet increased demand.  We have seen the water level behind many dams used for energy generation at risk of being too low to generate clean electricity.  We have seen the decommissioning of nuclear plants that generate clean energy.  (I'm not going to get into the important negatives of this energy source here.)  We have seen communities resisting the development and use of wind power. And we have yet to see wide scale deployment of solar power grids. Where are we going to get the additional energy we need when we have barriers to the generation of clean energy?

Next, we have to deal with our electric grid.  Out west, California's electric company has to deal with obsolete transmission systems that puts the state at risk of major forest fires every year.  (Power lines, transformers, etc. are all above ground where they are at most risk of causing problems.  Yet, it is uneconomical to bury the system underground as it is done in the big city.)  Can any of the smaller grids handle the extra demand for electricity?  I'm very doubtful that we can upgrade these systems within 12 years as many in the "blue states" believe can be done.

Then, we have the problem of upgrading wiring in both commercial and residential properties.  For example, how many homes' fossil fuel heating and cooking systems can be converted to electric powered systems at a reasonable cost?  Who will pay for the transition?  And we haven't even started to talk about transportation related issues. There may be only 30 charging stations within a 15 minute drive of where I live.  But I figure that we have over 500 gas pumps (or more) within the same area.  I can not justify installing 120 individually metered charging stations in my apartment complex to allow overnight charging.  Can I justify buying an electric car if I can't charge it at home?  Not with today's technology.  I can fill up a car with gas in 5 minutes and get a 300 mile driving range.  But, with today's electric cars, I might get 150 miles with a 30 minute charge.  Our politicians are placing a big bet on having all the technologies and systems in place within 12 years to justify a mandated end to the use of fossil fuels.

Years ago, T. Boone Pickens proposed a transition strategy to move the United States from a fossil fuel economy to a green energy economy.  It was not pie in the sty dreaming.  It was a pragmatic strategy developed by an oil man to address the problems related with global warming.  We have not implemented a pragmatic plan.  Instead, we are letting our ideals get in the way of seeing reality.  

I know one thing.  Due to global warming and government policy, I expect that I will see even higher energy bills to keep this apartment livable in both summer and winter.  This may be the one thing that gets me to leave the Hudson Valley for more hospitable climes....