Charging someone $17k for survival is NOT maga as fuck. It's is the most oligarchy Democrat big brother, government backed theivevery bullshit I have ever seen.
Maga is making america great, not fucking people over and enslaving them with debt.
There is NO free market for energy. Everyone who sells it does so on behalf of the government with their consent.
You can't buy it from someone else. You can't buy property and live off the land or off the grid.
You either get a job and pay taxes and participate in the economy, or else they will seize your property and someone else who wants to pay property taxes will get it.
You can choose to heat your own home with electricity, natural gas, propane (guess what, if you filled your propane tank last month, you didn't pay "surge" pricing), wood, etc, etc.
Or just turn down the thermostat, put on more clothes, chop some wood, do some jumping jacks, etc.
You can't buy property and live off the land or off the grid.
WTF? Really?
A large number of preppers would like a word with you...
It's a socialist game to act like you didn't have any choices and someone else should be responsible to take care of you.
I do agree that we should remove more regulation, allowing people more choice, but I don't currently believe it would have changed much here.
A $17k electric bill sucks, but that's what happens when you hit record energy pricing and make absolutely no accommodation in your consumption. Personal responsibility is a thing.
Any attempt to soften this blow, without holding the consumers responsible, will WEAKEN our ability to weather a crisis like this in the future.
There is at least one major way that government interference made this worse.
What portion of generation capacity investment do you think went toward wind and solar over the last decade?
I don't know the answer, but I know it's absurdly high, that the misallocation of resources was created by artificial government subsidies, and that those investments didn't help us here.
That is a newsworthy point to make.
If it wasn't so politically incorrect to talk about coal generation... Maybe the investment we've already made would have carried us through this crisis much more smoothly...
But think about it like this:
The crunch in energy prices was largely in natural gas (which is the primary backup to wind and solar). We can produce only so much gas per day, without time to build out more capacity (rework or drill wells). So, for the most part, in a short term crisis, we have a given amount of gas produced in the country.
When we hit record low temps across most of the country for an extended period...
We outran our ability to produce.
So, everyone in the country is now bidding on a limited supply of BTUs. As the price rises, we should naturally reduce our consumption, lessening the crisis.
People who were paying to run their outdoor sauna might turn it off. Great! There's gas saved to help keep grandma defrosted!
If someone is heating an uninsulated barn because they like to sit out there and paint watercolors, and they leave it running through this... they should pay $17k!
They denied that heating capacity to someone's grandma!
If they paid to heat the same barn, not for a frivolous reason, but, say they had $200k of seedlings that have to be kept warm, they still made an economic decision, and should be held to that.
I understand feeling blindsided by a dramatically higher electric or gas bill. That sucks, and it's not normally something we have to pay a whole lot of attention to.
But that's how a free market works, and I know the radio and television morons were actually warning people to reduce their consumption. They sometimes do spread important messages.
PS- I don't believe anyone with a reasonable sized home, running reasonable insulation, and keeping their thermostat set at a reasonable temp got a $17k bill.
It's just not believable (unless the billing is just wrong).
Something else is going on here. Grow op, something.
Take a look at that shithead fucking energy policy in CA. All thier infrastructure costs went into green policy.
They didn't give a F about maintaining the infrastructure they had. Now look at the place. They literally burned an entire city (Paradise, CA) to the ground two years ago because of a transformer problem .
Charging someone $17k for survival is NOT maga as fuck. It's is the most oligarchy Democrat big brother, government backed theivevery bullshit I have ever seen.
Maga is making america great, not fucking people over and enslaving them with debt.
There is NO free market for energy. Everyone who sells it does so on behalf of the government with their consent.
You can't buy it from someone else. You can't buy property and live off the land or off the grid.
You either get a job and pay taxes and participate in the economy, or else they will seize your property and someone else who wants to pay property taxes will get it.
Not true, brother.
You can choose to heat your own home with electricity, natural gas, propane (guess what, if you filled your propane tank last month, you didn't pay "surge" pricing), wood, etc, etc.
Or just turn down the thermostat, put on more clothes, chop some wood, do some jumping jacks, etc.
WTF? Really?
A large number of preppers would like a word with you...
It's a socialist game to act like you didn't have any choices and someone else should be responsible to take care of you.
I do agree that we should remove more regulation, allowing people more choice, but I don't currently believe it would have changed much here.
A $17k electric bill sucks, but that's what happens when you hit record energy pricing and make absolutely no accommodation in your consumption. Personal responsibility is a thing.
Any attempt to soften this blow, without holding the consumers responsible, will WEAKEN our ability to weather a crisis like this in the future.
Quit with the emotional arguments!
There is at least one major way that government interference made this worse.
What portion of generation capacity investment do you think went toward wind and solar over the last decade?
I don't know the answer, but I know it's absurdly high, that the misallocation of resources was created by artificial government subsidies, and that those investments didn't help us here.
That is a newsworthy point to make.
If it wasn't so politically incorrect to talk about coal generation... Maybe the investment we've already made would have carried us through this crisis much more smoothly...
But think about it like this:
The crunch in energy prices was largely in natural gas (which is the primary backup to wind and solar). We can produce only so much gas per day, without time to build out more capacity (rework or drill wells). So, for the most part, in a short term crisis, we have a given amount of gas produced in the country.
When we hit record low temps across most of the country for an extended period...
We outran our ability to produce.
So, everyone in the country is now bidding on a limited supply of BTUs. As the price rises, we should naturally reduce our consumption, lessening the crisis.
People who were paying to run their outdoor sauna might turn it off. Great! There's gas saved to help keep grandma defrosted!
If someone is heating an uninsulated barn because they like to sit out there and paint watercolors, and they leave it running through this... they should pay $17k!
They denied that heating capacity to someone's grandma!
If they paid to heat the same barn, not for a frivolous reason, but, say they had $200k of seedlings that have to be kept warm, they still made an economic decision, and should be held to that.
I understand feeling blindsided by a dramatically higher electric or gas bill. That sucks, and it's not normally something we have to pay a whole lot of attention to.
But that's how a free market works, and I know the radio and television morons were actually warning people to reduce their consumption. They sometimes do spread important messages.
PS- I don't believe anyone with a reasonable sized home, running reasonable insulation, and keeping their thermostat set at a reasonable temp got a $17k bill.
It's just not believable (unless the billing is just wrong).
Something else is going on here. Grow op, something.
you're absolutely correct.
Take a look at that shithead fucking energy policy in CA. All thier infrastructure costs went into green policy.
They didn't give a F about maintaining the infrastructure they had. Now look at the place. They literally burned an entire city (Paradise, CA) to the ground two years ago because of a transformer problem .