Here's My Supplement To The Pickens Plan For Your Review And Comment.

Fully off foreign oil, putting 2.3 million people to work and all for about $126B in public funds.

Supplemental Plan To The Pickens Plan - It's time to power up this ...

Let's have the critique and suggestions so we can refine it into something to work towards. Look for my other blogs on highly relevant topics that need to be addressed.

Todd

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Permalink Reply by RWC1972 on August 15, 2008 at 3:13pm

Do you have the excel spreadsheet? I didn't see that it was attached.

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Permalink Reply by Todd McKissick on August 15, 2008 at 9:00pm

Thanks for catching that! I posted it in "Solar Power" first and got caught up in formatting when I copied that one to my blog which I just linked to above. All fixed and looking forward to your critique.

Todd

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Permalink Reply by RWC1972 on August 16, 2008 at 12:26am

Okay, took a look over the spreadsheet . . . .

I think you are making a lot of assumptions with regards to ideas becoming reality with little regard to the costs that it will actually take to make them happen if they do happen at all.

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Permalink Reply by Todd McKissick on August 16, 2008 at 10:02pm

Which areas do you think are too optimistic? Those assumptions are based on hundreds of hours of research, past successful predictions and contact with many professionals in various industries, but I'm still open to changes.

Keep in mind that I'm not promoting any specific time frame. Time is the one thing that's the most unpredictable because it depends so heavily on influential lobbies. I am also not suggesting for this to necessarily be 'promoted' because it's all market driven. In other words, it'll probably just happen on it's own. I'm offering it to be used more as a guideline of what to plan around.

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Permalink Reply by Warner on August 21, 2008 at 9:50am

Your ideas are reasonable. But I will always believe that private enterprise is better than
the public dollar.

Whatever plan or plans are finally decided upon, I will always say they will cost more than
anyone ever estimates and we could pay for them easier if we went to the FairTax.

The FairTax is a national sales tax that will repeal and replace the income tax.

You can learn more at www.fairtax.org or see The FairTax Book by Neal Boortz.

Without going into any detail: the FairTax could be in place within a year or less...it would save
us $100s of billions per year which is what we pay annually in compliance costs for the income
tax. The FairTax costs very little to administer. Moreover it will spur investment in general and
specifically in many new businesses which are involved with energy production.

Remember that many poor and lower-income folks are just struggling to keep above water
now. The FairTax will put more money in their pockets right away--not years down the line.
We need to consider that too.

Thanks

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Permalink Reply by JohnG on August 21, 2008 at 12:47pm

I have always been oposed to replacing income tax with a national sales tax, BUT, I am now giving it thought because of the economic policies of Bush administration which seem to be:
1. Spend all of the money you have.
2. Spend all of the money that you can charge on your credit cards.
3. Borrow (HELOC) as much as you can on your house and spend it.
4. We will borrow from the Chinese and send you more to spend as a 'stimulus package'.
A tax on consumption would sovle a lot of problems but there would be short term shocks to the economy.

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Permalink Reply by Warner on August 22, 2008 at 11:56am

There are many advantages to the FairTax plan. Your points are well taken.
Some of them are discussed in The FairTax Book by Neal Boortz.

What the FairTax would do right now though is put real money (their own
earned dollars) in the bank accounts of the poor and middle class Americans
who are being squeezing now by high energy costs. How can they afford to
finance the new wind/solar/natural gas economy and still pay bills owed to
the old economy? The FairTax would help.
www.fairtax.org.
Thanks

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Permalink Reply by Todd McKissick on August 24, 2008 at 11:38pm

The government with all it's outside influence is never going to make a decision to go after a solution like the fair tax. It's just beyond their capacity with all that lobby money in their face. Personally, I like Ron Paul's elimination of the income tax altogether but I don't see either of them making any headway.

The $125 billion allocated in this plan is peanuts compared to the investment and private money it relies on. Those two total around $2 trillion. Unfortunately, the government is needed in various parts of this, and as government programs go, they will insist on researching it in their own way. Those two functions consume most of that public money but the rest is by local and state municipalities. Doing this any other way just drags out the progress too long. Take a peek at the speed that the renewables investments have gone from small to enormous. That's encouraging.

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Permalink Reply by JohnG on August 21, 2008 at 12:51pm

The government has to be part of the solution. An interstate road system that was left up to 'private enterprise' would literally 'go nowhere'!

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Permalink Reply by Warner on August 24, 2008 at 7:56am

Well...not to be to bothersome with analogies...but we arent building a highway
system here. It is vastly more complex and will require sums of money which--
if the government taxes us for or borrows---will be very economically unwise.

On the other hand the capitalist system has done some pretty amazing things.

I know mistakes will be made along the way --but that is the nature of things.
If we have the federal government running things, mistakes will not be corrected.
They will just have a life of their own.

Thanks

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Permalink Reply by Todd McKissick on August 24, 2008 at 11:31pm

There are very few things we should have to rely on the government for in this plan but since our grid does cross state lines and there are many states that strongly don't believe in the accepted solutions, we will need some federal opinions to be passed down. See my blog post on the smart grid for another major one that has the potential to single handedly make or break the distributed generation industry.

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Permalink Reply by Mathew Andresen on August 21, 2008 at 2:22pm

Also government should be able to look a bit further into the future than private enterprise. Private companies are mainly focused on the next couple years, and rarely plan beyond 10. The government should be invovled in long term infrastructure where the benefits last many decades.