All Equity is not Equal?

“Forget Bain — Obama’s public-equity record is the real scandal.” He describes outlandish examples of how the taxpayers’ money that has gone down the tubes at private firms, including Solyndra, of course. Others investment failures include Raser Technologies, which received a $33 million grant to build a power plant and filed for bankruptcy protection this year; ECOtality, which received $126.2 million to install electric car chargers in five states among other projects, has lost more than $45 million, and whose president, now under investigation for insider trading, was hosted in the First Lady’s box and singled out as a stimulus “success story” during the 2010 State of the Union address; and First Solar, which received more than $3 billion in loan guarantees, fell to a record low on the stock market this month, and fired 30 percent of its workforce.

I have long been talking about the poor “return on investment” for taxpayers, noting that far too much of the money that they involuntarily “send” to Washington goes to waste. This case was made again in my May 22 Washington Times op-ed, where I pointed out that “The result of the ‘investment’ made by ‘Obama Capital,’ which has used hundreds of billions of dollars of the taxpayers’ money to ‘create jobs,’ has been a persistent 8 percent unemployment rate and annual trillion dollar-plus deficits.”