Remember “Cash For Clunkers”, the absolute waste of $5.5 billion of your taxpayer dollars. That government waste has a baby brother called, “Cash For Caulkers” or The Home Star Bill. This new program is a gift to homeowners, who renovating their homes with better insulation and energy-saving windows and doors.
The Bill passed the House Thursday, 246-161. Great news for homeowners, dreadful news for taxpayers. You will now shell-out another $5.7 billion dollars, while adding to our multi-trillion dollar debt. It seems Congress has
found some money just laying around that we don’t need.
A similar $4.3 billion dollar energy retrofit program was introduced with the stimulus package last year, and was a complete failure. Depicted as a jobs creator and economy booster, that program was riddled with uncompleted jobs, contractor rip-offs and poor quality work by inexperienced labor. Now the federal government says, lets give it another try, it’s only money.
Add up the figures and you have to say “Are you insane?.” Republicans overwhelmingly opposed the bill, and they were able to attach a condition that it would be terminated if Democrats do not come up with a way to pay for it, right. This is just another free program designed to soften the blow of an administration out of control.
Under the Home Star Program, rebates or discounts would be provided to homeowners at the time of sale. The retailer or contractor then would submit documentation to a processing office which would verify the information and forward the request to the Energy Department for payment.
To prevent fraud, the program would require licensing for all participating contractors and a certain percentage of projects would be inspected. These were the same stipulations that failed under the earlier retrofit program, under stimulus one. Rep. Joe Barton of Texas said, “This is not a terribly bad bill, but it has one fatal flaw: It is not paid for.”
This administration’s constant grabbing at straws, to try and resolve our economic problem, shows a real lack of imagination. Nothing a few billion dollars can’t fix.
Author: Tex Silva, Cityclix.net Guest Writer
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