If you want an idea of how absurd President Barack Obama’s $3.8 trillion budget request for 2013 is, consider the fact that he actually wants to increase funding for the U.S. Department of Energy.
You may recall that billions of tax dollars flowed through the Energy Department to failed “green energy” projects such as bankrupt California solar panel maker Solyndra.
CBS News reported this year that it found 12 “green” companies that got billions from Washington “then declared bankruptcy or are suffering other serious financial issues.”
Beacon Power, one such company, was deemed by Standard & Poor’s credit rating agency to have a 70 percent chance of failing. Yet that didn’t stop the administration from giving Beacon tens of millions of dollars — after which the company went under.
It was also via the Energy Department that the Obama administration halted the planned Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in Nevada. Taxpayers had pumped billions of dollars into Yucca Mountain so that it could accommodate spent nuclear fuel from around the country. But to please Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and environmentalists, the administration ended the project, and another huge investment by the Energy Department was lost.