Unintended Consequences - Cash for Caulkers

Here is the plan from Al Gore's blog:

Cash for Caulkers May 13, 2010 : 2:35 PM
Another important piece of legislation passes the House of Representatives:

�Homeowners could collect thousands of dollars in Cash for Caulkers rebates for renovating their homes with better insulation and energy-saving windows and doors under a new economic stimulus bill the House passed Thursday.�

�The Home Star bill, passed 246-161, would authorize $5.7 billion over two years for a program that supporters � mostly Democrats � said would have the added benefits of invigorating the slumping construction industry and making the earth a little cleaner.�

"Home Star is that solid investment that's going to achieve that hat trick of energy savings for the homeowner, of moving toward a cleaner environment and of creating jobs here at home," said bill sponsor Peter Welch, D-VT.�

Here is how it gets implemented in the real world -- from the Texas Watchdog:

47 homes retrofitted, $3.7M spent in Texas through Dec. under program to improve low-income homes
Texas has spent $3.7 million to weatherize just 47 homes through December under a program set up by Congress a year ago in economic stimulus legislation.

This amounts to a taxpayer cost of $78,000 per home.

A little more than $200,000 paid for materials and labor to retrofit the homes, an official said. The remaining $3.5 million was used to grow the state's housing agency so it can attempt to make as many as 56,000 low-income homes more energy-efficient by March 2012.

Emphasis mine -- it is obvious that these are two separate programs but the end effect is the same. A few 'showcase' projects and a large bureaucratic growth. This is what happens when you get big government involved in daily life. Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy writ large.

In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.

The second quote -- the Texas Watchdog story -- is a much longer read and really worth looking at for a clear picture of how fscked this government is -- nothing but special interests looking out for each other. 2010 is shaping up to be an interesting year -- interesting in the old Chinese curse kind of way...