GOP no new taxes mantra leads to new taxes by other names

The knee-jerk swooning for toll roads is Exhibit A. Tennessee, Florida and Mississippi, all GOP-governed states, have passed sweeping toll road legislation. Florida’s law is even clearly directed at privatizing and tolling currently free and state-owned roadways.

Especially in this case, where the road was already built by tax money, it’s a new tax. Even if it’s to build a new road, if a toll road bill doesn’t have sunset provisions to make the toll system go ahead once the original cost of the road is paid off, it’s a new tax.

Fact is, especially at the statehouse level, where GOP governors are too chickenshit to tell Grover Norquist where to get off, GOP-controlled legislatures, and GOP governors, are going to devise more new fees, surcharges, user moneys, etc. all the time while refusing to call them “taxes” and continuing to repeat the “no new taxes” mantra.

It’s governance of the worst kind, that fails to confront the middle class and say:

Here’s the services you want. Here’s how much they cost. Now, how do you want to pay the bill?

(It should also be noted that most states’ tax systems are more regressive than the federal one, including federal FICA taxes.)

I call bullshit on alleged cheap Texas electricity

MSN Money’s Jim Jubak has the facts.

Texas residential customers already pay some of the highest prices for electricity in the country. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, a residential customer in Texas paid an average rate of 12.09 cents per kilowatt-hour. Only the Northeast and California pay higher rates.

This is another lie, yes lie, of the majority of the Texas Legislature, including a few Democrats here and there, and the vast majority of the upper crust of the Texas GOP, that needs a stake through its heart once and for all.

Part of the problem, as people who follow the issue know, is that the “price to beat” is based on natural gas, not coal, setting aside environmental issues.

A bigger part of the problem sees Texas hoist by its own petard. “Texas is God” wingnuts, among other things, boast about its independent electric grid.

Well, that cuts both ways. Cheap out-of-state power can’t easily get to Texas. Hello???

Plus, the propsed KKR buyout of TXU will only make things worse.

Jubak said Texas being off the national electric grid is one problem.

Buyouts like that of TXU work only because of inefficiencies like this, and in the long run, buyout firms have an interest in perpetuating these inefficiencies so that local prices stay high.

Wunderbar.

KKR’s “green” takeover of TXU could take more green from your wallet, too

Hold the phone, there, Nellie. MSN Money’s Jim Jubak has the scoop on how folks like Kohlberg Kravis Roberts see plenty of dinero in deregulated electric utilities.

And, down below, he shows how the Natural Resources Defense Council pretty much got hoodwinked on this deal as a “front” for KKR

First, this sobering reminder from private equity company history:

The last time Wall Street applied its best minds to the electric power industry, they brought us Enron, brownouts and wholesale-price-gouging in California, not to mention higher electric bills.

Now, not even 10 years later, they're at it again: Private-equity buyout funds have set their sights on electric utilities. And the result will be? You guessed it, higher electric bills for you and me. As if inflation and the rising cost of oil and natural gas isn't pushing our bills up fast enough already.

I already warned, in an early blog post on this subject, that KKR would try to recoup the buyout price by canning people. Jubak agrees:

In the short run, making a profit on one of these buyout deals depends, first, on "restructuring" the company so that it's more profitable than it was before the buyout. Most of the time, restructuring involves spinning off money-losing operations and outsourcing some part of operations — and it always involves cutting jobs.

But that’s not all, he says;

That would be bad enough in the case of a utility, since job cuts are likely to mean a decline in utility service.

But you'll wind up paying more for less service because, second, turning those small gains in corporate profits into big profits for buyout investors rests on building the buyout deal so that borrowed money, known as leverage, multiplies those relatively modest improvements in corporate earnings.

Problem A, according to Jubak, is 75 percent of such a buyout is done by selling debt based on the acquired company’s real property, etc.

Well, TXU already has enough debt:

Even before the deal, TXU was carrying a big load of short-term ($1.5 billion) and long-term ($10.6 billion) debt, and paying a sizable interest bill of $784 million in 2006. Adding an additional $33 billion or so in debt will run that interest bill significantly higher. And that additional debt load will put pressure on the company’s credit rating, already a relatively low BB from Standard & Poor’s.

Dang, the school district I covered at my previous paper, in it’s worst days, wasn’t rated that low.

But, that’s still not all:

And that's not the limit of the debt load to be piled on the purchased company's balance sheet. Used to be that buyout funds waited until they dressed up a company and sold it back to public investors before they cashed out. In today's market, buyout funds have added a new wrinkle: While the company is still private, it issues a big cash dividend to the buyout investors, so those investors get part of their cash back in short order. How does the company pay for that dividend? Why, by issuing more debt, of course!

And how’s that debt financed? Just open that TXU envelope every month, in a deregulated market, and you’ll find out.

Jubak also explains that KKR’s promise to not build more power plans is money-green, not enviro-green, indicating the Natural Resources Defense Council, and some of us until now, have been hoodwinked.

The long-run logic of utility buyouts leads to lower investment in power lines that would eliminate price differences like those that cost consumers money in Texas (and California and the Northeast). And it leads to lower investment in new power plants, since spending cash on new, more efficient plants cuts the utility cash flow so necessary to paying all that post-buyout debt.

Nice. KKR and TXU get “green” window dressing for what was going to happen anyway.

PTSD issues suck

Mood: Mix of shitty, rundown, tired, anxious and other emotions and body sensations.

After a whole week or more with no problems, the sleep issue returned last night. (Don't know if part of it was a muggy evening that didn't want to cool down a lot.)

Anyway, I woke up an hour or a little more early, as I have been doing in the past. It was compounded by being in a bad dream about having a bunch, a bunch of stuff to do at work, which I don't actually have.

Tried going back to sleep. I reached some state near sleep after half an hour, at which point the a-hole in my apartment complex who turned on a ShopVac at 8 a.m. Saturday, followed by wheeling a 2-ton car jack on the sidewalk, rolled the car jack out at just after 7 on a Monday morning. So, i tried again to get some last bits of sleep, but it didn't happen before the alarm, and the one snooze time I allow for an extra nine minutes.

Got up, got ready, etc. and wound up having enough anxiety problems that I had a mild throw-up before I left some, with a queasy stomach most the rest of the day.

I hate where the hell a lot of my life's aspects are at right now. Maybe I need to do another "acceptance" list.

Carbon offsets like medieval indulgences? “Amen” to that

Or, as another person quoted in this article says, the idea of purchasing a “carbon offset,” to get three trees planted to make up for the carbon dioxide from a plane flight or whatever, smacks of so much of today’s America — long on consumerism, light on sacrifice. (Perhaps that’s part of why Shrub hasn’t called for any “sacrifice” related to the invasion of Iraq.)

Here’s the quote referenced above:

“The worst of the carbon-offset programs resemble the Catholic Church’s sale of indulgences back before the Reformation,” said Denis Hayes, the president of the Bullitt Foundation, an environmental grant-making group. “Instead of reducing their carbon footprints, people take private jets and stretch limos, and then think they can buy an indulgence to forgive their sins.”

“This whole game is badly in need of a modern Martin Luther,” Mr. Hayes added.

The article goes on to note environmentalists are split on the issue. Well, I’m one of the ones who agrees with Hayes.

Plus, there’s the question about just how true-to-life this market is:

Hayes said there were legitimate companies and organizations that help people and companies measure their emissions and find ways to cut them, both directly and indirectly by purchasing certain kinds of credits. But overall, he said, an investment in such credits — given the questions about their reliability — should be looked at more as conventional charity (presuming you check to be sure the projects are real) and less as something like a license to binge on private jet travel.

I agree that it’s like buying wood from a sustainable harvest forest… there’s few such claims that pan out.

Instead, this lets people avoid on insisting that Boeing and Airbus get to work on designing more efficient jetliners, as well as looking at their own lifestyles more carefully.

Mac users, NO, you’re not “hack free”

Nine hours to hack OS X clearly says otherwise. Macs just don’t get attacked because they’re just 5 percent of the market.

“If a hacker turned their attention to the Mac, it would suffer just as much as Windows,” Ray Wagner said. “Attacking the 95 percent of the market gets them more attention.”

According to research Wagner did in the last year, an operating system would need to hit the 20 to 30 percent penetration level before it really becomes a target for hackers. This is the point where hackers will feel it is worth the time to expose a vulnerability.

That’s not so hard to understand now, is it?