This is interesting...

I confess I've stopped following the news from Bailout-istan. Too confusin'. But this piece was less opaque than most things I've read...

Why A New Power Grid Will Pay - Forbes.com:

...Officials have thus far dispensed TARP money in ways that make it very likely that private sector recipients of those funds will repay the government over time. As a result, taxpayers will ultimately be responsible for little to none of the TARP expenditures.

As the TARP money has been doled out to banks and other financial companies, the government has taken back preferred stock and equity warrants in these companies.

The Treasury Department can sell these securities or hold them until they are redeemed by the companies that issued them. So in any company that survives--and most will with the benefit of government support--the government should get all its money back with interest.

New Hampshire Sen. Judd Gregg's recent estimate that the TARP funds have earned the government a profit of $8 billion in three months only underscores this point. As the new administration looks for ways to revive the economy, it should favor projects that could be sold or leased to the private sector after completion.

For example, the federal government could rebuild the nation's electricity transmission grid. The project would create thousands of new jobs, many of them skilled. And a modernized grid would have immediate commercial value both to existing power companies and to the new green energy companies that Obama has talked so much about....

Sounds like something that it actually makes sense for government to do. Hopefully culminating in selling the stuff off to the private sector. And if Mr Obama tried something like this, he would at least get a good lesson in the twisted way environmentalist wackos render impossible the very green-energy projects they claim to favor, by blocking anyone from building transmission lines from the usually rural areas where things like wind and solar power happen. And he could employ his socialist-bully muscles in steam-rollering over some Greens! that would give me a laugh or two...

Posted by John Weidner at January 15, 2009 6:36 PM