Texas Politician Puts His $$$ Where His Mouth Is
Rockadelic
Out Digging 13,993 Posts
Shami promises jobs or your money back[/b] Houston businessman Farouk Shami(D) is prepared to give a new sales pitch to voters: more jobs or your money back.Shami filmed two commercials that will air in the coming weeks where he promises to create a minimum of 100,000 jobs in two years as governor or he will resign and give $10 million to the state,[/b] according to KHOU.But wait, there's more: Shami is continuing to pitch the centerpiece of his economic plan, which is to build factories in economically distressed neighborhoods that will create and install solar panels - free of charge.Under Shami's plan, electricity generated by the panels would be sold to power companies until the bill for the installation is paid off. Then, the solar panels would be turned over to homeowners.
Comments
b/w
that's awesome.
Obviously
b/w
Yeah it is
A politician who is making a promise backed by dollars? Rock must be busting a nut over this.
You guys think that a politician that promises to put .4% of Texans back to work in two years time, or sacrifice 100$ per head, is some sort of game changer?
b/w
$10M is a lot of money, Ignasty. He could have said "...or everyone gets a potted cactus for free."
JP.....I realize this was a shot, and I'm cool w/that....but for the record, petroleum oil is used to create about 1% of the electricity in the U.S....and I don't believe the state of Texas uses it at all for electricity generation.
Dr. Wu....it's a refreshing change from those who get into politics to suck money out of the system rather than put some back in, but it's a gimmick and $10 million doesn't go very far.
Ig....100K jobs is 100K jobs and no one is going to downplay that given that most states are losing that many jobs annually.
I'm surprised someone with such a dim view of American politicans could even bear to live here - even Fox News isn't approaching that level of cynicism.
I'm not nearly as cynical as the dude who performed the below study, but there are very few career politicians that I respect and can confidently say put the good of the people/country before their personal objectives.
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POLITICIANS AND SERIAL KILLERS[/b]
Using his law enforcement experience and data drawn from the FBI's behavioral analysis unit, Jim Kouri has collected a series of personality traits common to a couple of professions.
Kouri, who's a vice president of the National Assn. of Chiefs of Police, has assembled traits such as superficial charm, an exaggerated sense of self-worth, glibness, lying, lack of remorse and manipulation of others.
These traits, Kouri points out in his analysis, are common to psychopathic serial killers.
But -- and here's the part that may spark some controversy and defensive discussion -- these traits are also common to American politicians. (Maybe you already suspected.)
Yup. Violent homicide aside, our elected officials often show many of the exact same character traits as criminal nut-jobs, who run from police but not for office.
Kouri notes that these criminals are psychologically capable of committing their dirty deeds free of any concern for social, moral or legal consequences and with absolutely no remorse.
"This allows them to do what they want, whenever they want," he wrote. "Ironically, these same traits exist in men and women who are drawn to high-profile and powerful positions in society including political officeholders."
Good grief! And we not only voted for these people, we're paying their salaries and entrusting them to spend our national treasure in wise ways.
I'm not an expert about solar energy, but this plan seems a bit odd.
So he wants to build solar panels for installation in homes that connect directly to the grid? That makes me think a couple things, but I'm open to someone correcting me:
1) That's going to have a long payback period. PV systems are still very expensive, let's say about $15k for a 2 KW system that might produce about 4000 kWh per year, which I think would be a generous assumption in TX. This is also about 1/3 as much electricity as the average home in the US uses in a year. The average price of residential electricity in the US is 12 cents per kWh. At this rate it would take over 30 years to payback the cost of the system if the local utility bought all of the power at the retail price of electricity. Bear in mind that not all utilities will pay you for pumping electricity back into the grid.
However, this calculation is based on retail price of the system. If dude is calculating payback on the cost of manufacturing the system then payback would be much faster.
2) That's going to be a logistical nightmare.
Don't get me wrong, that's an amazing idea, and it's really dope how active TX has been of late with renewable energy generation and energy efficiency practices. This plan just seems a bit strange to me.
From what I understand, solar has more immediate relevance for the residential sector in specific applications like hot water generation than for large scale energy production. Again, I'm no expert on the subject though.
As such, when compared to 2008-09, the next biennium is expected to show some significant economic declines. Texas job growth in 2008-09 is on track to average 2.0 percent per year. For 2010-11, the average annual growth rate is expected to drop to 1.1 percent.
On the positive side, Texas can be expected to maintain a comparative advantage over the nation as a whole in 2010-11. While Texas employment is expected to decline by 111,000 jobs in the first two quarters of calendar 2009, this decline should reverse in the fourth quarter of calendar 2009, with employment growth accelerating throughout fiscal 2010 and into 2011. As such, our state should continue to add jobs throughout the upcoming biennium, while the nation???s job count is projected to decline by an average 0.3 percent per year."
http://www.window.state.tx.us/taxbud/bre2010/outlook.html
I guess I'm just weary of politicians promising below projected job growth OR YOUR MONEY BACK.
I'm not sure if there is the equivalent legislation in Texas right now, but here in Ontario we have a feed-in tarrif which guarantees the homeowner a premium price when installing solar on their home and selling it back to the grid. Right now it is at 80 cents per KW for solar and around 13 cents for wind. For solar, this provides a payback period of about 12 years for the homeowner.
The government pays out a lot more for the power, but part of the reason for doing this is that the reduction in electricity demand on our generating stations and on our power transmission infrastructure saves them far more than they pay out. It also provides a huge economic incentive for businesses to invest in solar and wind farms, which means a lot of jobs. Wind and solar farms are going up like crazy around here, and if you have enough renewable development going on, you may attract one of the firms to actually open a production facility here, which means even more jobs. I know some US states are really involved in this as well and right now there's a lot of competition between these provinces and states to attract this sort of business.