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Fastwalker
Joined: 26 Mar 2003
Posts: 832
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 Sat Aug 02, 2003 6:08 pm
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Answer the following question and you'll see that my statement was not a lie. It will also tell me how you think;
If I pay you 100,000 dollars for a broken down Ford Taurus with 200,000 miles on it, who is responsible for that idiotic deal;
1. The Buyer?
2. The Seller?
3. The manufacturer?
4. The president of Ford Motor company?
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KNOW-THIS
Joined: 14 Jul 2003
Posts: 3694
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Sat Aug 02, 2003 6:19 pm
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Don't read this F-walker, it contains irrefutable evidence that is heavily damaging to your position......
"It is embarrassing that former Governor Pete Wilson is now attempting to absolve himself of blame for the electricity deregulation disaster California is trying to dig itself out of.
When Mr. Wilson signed the deregulation bill with great fanfare in 1996, he called it "landmark legislation [that] is a major step in our efforts to guarantee lower rates, provide consumer choice and offer reliable service, so no one literally is left in the dark."
One thing is for sure: Despite his current who-me? campaign, Mr. Wilson was not in the dark about what has turned into the most expensive and dangerous fiasco ever to confront California.
He campaigned for deregulation. His appointees on the Public Utilities Commission designed and implemented the plan from beginning to end. The legislation that ultimately passed the Legislature provided exactly the structure Wilson demanded. As recently as April, he told the San Diego Union-Tribune, "I take credit for having been the driving force to launch deregulation."
But now that deregulation has turned into Mr. Wilson's - and the state's - Frankenstein, the former governor wants to wash his hands of it, saying it didn't turn out the way he envisioned it. Incredibly, Mr. Wilson last month told The Associated Press he knew when he signed the legislation it was "obviously flawed," but that he "fully expected that . . . my successor as governor . . . would see and remedy a couple of pretty clear faults." So Pete Wilson now expects Governor Gray Davis to clean up his mess.
In fact, the fatal flaws in Mr. Wilson's plan were many. Chief among them was that California's three investor-owned utilities were forced to sell off their fossil-fuel power plants. Most of them were bought by out-of-state energy companies - several in Texas. Unlike the utilities, whose prices charged to consumers were regulated by the PUC, these so-called "merchant" generators were free to charge any price they could get for wholesale power.
Under Mr. Wilson's direct order, the utilities also were prohibited from contracting ahead with these firms for power, forcing them to buy power on the wild spot market, with no limit being placed on the price they would have to pay.
Deregulation envisioned a world in which the utilities would become mere delivery boys, buying power in a supposedly free market from competing sellers and, in turn, providing that juice to their residential and business customers at a fixed rate high enough to ensure they made a profit.
But this free market never came to be. Instead, it has turned out to be a dysfunctional disaster. Under this half free-market, half-regulated hybrid, generators quickly learned how to demand unheard-of prices in what became a sellers' market.
For instance, in the pre-deregulation market of 1998, the price for electricity was $10-$20 per megawatt-hour. Even in early 2000, we were paying an average of only $30 for a megawatt of power. But by the middle of last year, wholesale prices spiked to astronomical levels - up to an average of $200-$300 per megawatt-hour. For a few days in January of this year, the cost reached a staggering $3,880 per megawatt hour from one out-of-state generator - a nearly 12,000 percent increase over the average wholesale price in 1998.
Here was the fly in the ointment: Most experts agree that deregulation works only if a state has a significant surplus of power. Now, Mr. Wilson says the Davis administration overlooked the explosive growth in electricity consumption brought on by the New Economy. But it was the Wilson administration that ignored it and caused our current shortages.
According to the California Energy Commission, during Mr. Wilson's entire eight years in office he licensed only nine new power plants - none of them classified as "major," meaning those producing 300 or more megawatts of power. Two of those plants were never built and one was downsized. So the grand total of new power-generating capacity Mr. Wilson added to the system was exactly 995.5 megawatts - barely the output of one of our largest existing plants.
Mr. Wilson now claims he left the state with a 30 percent surplus of electricity. But the putative power glut he gloats about was gone even before deregulation took effect in 1998. For example, peak electricity demand in the summer of 1998 was 54,648 megawatts, compared to in-state electricity generation of approximately 53,000 megawatts, according to the energy commission. The only way we made it through that summer - Mr. Wilson's last as governor - was with imports from neighboring states.
In fact, it was not until April 1999 under Governor Davis that the energy commission began licensing new major power plants. This increase is directly connected to the governor's new fast-track licensing process that reduced approval time for major plants to six months from Wilson's cumbersome 12-month process. And for "peaker" plants, which run only during times of peak demand, a Davis executive order has cut approval time to just 21 days.
Under the fast-track process, 16 new major power plants have been licensed. Ten are under construction, four will be on line this summer, four next summer. And eight smaller peaker plants are now being built as well. By the end of September the governor will have brought nearly 5,000 megawatts of new power on line, enough to power nearly five million homes.
Beyond failing to plan for needed generation, another fault in Mr. Wilson's plan was the prohibition against forward contracting by the utilities. Had he not blocked the utilities from entering into long-term contracts for power, they could have locked in reasonable prices. It was not until May 1999 - five months into Governor Davis' term - that the PUC overrode the deregulation law and began allowing the utilities to purchase power in blocks of a month ahead.
Then, in a series of actions from the summer of 1999 through the winter of 2000, the commission continued that break with the deregulation law, allowing the utilities to make forward purchases for power up to the full amount they needed. And contrary to Mr. Wilson's charge, the utilities in 2000 did lock down substantial amounts of long-term power under contract.
The third fatal flaw in the Wilson deregulation plan was that it gave control over wholesale power prices to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), which is charged by federal law with ensuring that prices for wholesale power are "just and reasonable." Even though this toothless agency has found the prices charged California over the last year to be unreasonable, it has refused to take any significant action to cap these outrageous prices.
Governor Davis has been joined by the governors of Oregon and Washington and by nationally known economists in calling on FERC to approve temporary price caps to give the new generation we are building time to come on line and to allow the other market reforms he has instituted a chance to work.
Meanwhile, the Davis administration has put in place strong measures to increase energy conservation, including nearly $850 million in incentives. That conservation effort produced an 11 percent reduction in electricity use in May. Additionally, the Davis administration is taking strides toward ensuring long-term power supplies by working to finalize nearly 50 long-term power supply contracts that will provide an average of 9,700 megawatts of reasonably priced power over the next 10 years.
And Governor Davis has also created a California public power authority that can build and own enough generation capacity to ensure a safe surplus even if the private generating companies do not build new plants.
It was the wishful thinking of a free-market ideologue for Mr. Wilson to assert that the botched deregulation law would magically bring a stable, low-cost energy market to California. Make no mistake: He created this disaster by designing and signing a deregulation scheme he himself has since acknowledged was screwed up.
If the former governor truly wants to be helpful, he should cease blaming his successor for this fiasco and add his voice to those calling on the leader of his own party, President George W. Bush, to support the governor's effort to bring sanity to the wholesale power market by cracking down on the gouging out-of-state generators.
It is a critically important effort that needs the cooperation of the former governor and the current president to fix what was broken - and what Mr. Wilson clearly knew was broken - long before the current governor ever took office"
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Fastwalker
Joined: 26 Mar 2003
Posts: 832
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Sat Aug 02, 2003 6:38 pm
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Nobody's arguing that Wilson deregulated the market. I'm saying deregulation wasn't the cause.
PARTIAL DEREGULATION was the cause.
Who implemented price caps on what energy producers could charge resulting in PARTIAL deregulation?
Secondly, before we can have a rational conversation, you need to answer the questions I ask above, starting with the multiple choice.
Let's finish one point before you move onto the next. You accused me of lying in saying that Enron wasn't to blame for the California energy crisis
.in fact, that it had little to do with it. To deal with this point, we need to see where you are coming from in your ideology, and examine if my statement was indeed valid.
That's why I designed a question for you in order to complete the analogy; Please answer it, so we can move to other points....otherwise you are just bouncing around, and nobody gets to actual truth.
We can't truly rely on information you cut and paste here until we know the sources any way. A filter for getting at truth and knowing if the articles are propaganda or not is to examine claims from a logical or reasoning stand point.....I am saying this approach is necessary because there is a tremendous amount of propaganda and revisionist history out there floated by the corrupt and well funded Davis administration....and you are cut and pasting without identifying the source.
That is not the way to get at truth in this complex subject. It is complex because many people are trying to hide the truth, as I say. Many people are putting out propaganda. You can't just cut and paste the first article that supports your claim and then use that as a truthful verification of that claim. It must also fit the test of logic and reasoning....
So take the first step to truth...Answer the following question;
If I pay you 100,000 dollars for a broken down Ford Taurus with 200,000 miles on it, who is responsible for that idiotic deal;
1. The Buyer?
2. The Seller?
3. The manufacturer?
4. The president of Ford Motor company?
[Edited 1 times, lastly by Fastwalker on 08-02-2003] |
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KNOW-THIS
Joined: 14 Jul 2003
Posts: 3694
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Sat Aug 02, 2003 6:58 pm
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And I'm showing you that it WAS THE CAUSE.........It's your opinion verse mine. this could continue on forever. You have lied so many times before. I have caught them and brought them to light. I do not trust or believe anything you say. This is because I am a rational, reasonable person. If you had a reputation for being honest, I might consider your theories. You've gone to such extremes with so many erroneous statements. It has become impossible for me to take anything you say seriously anymore. This is a dead issue now, it's over. If someone is going to convince me otherwise, it's going to have to be someone with some degree of credibility. This person is definitely not going to be you. We all know what you believe F-Walker, we also know the tactics you use to present those beliefs. You really need to come back down to earth. I think you've been hanging with Seeker a bit too much. |
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KNOW-THIS
Joined: 14 Jul 2003
Posts: 3694
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Sun Aug 03, 2003 10:04 pm
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by Paul Krugman
From smog to silicon, from the sexual revolution to the tax revolt, the future has
usually arrived in California first. Now the Golden State is degenerating into a
banana republic. Can the nation be far behind?
The recall isn't just a case of hardball politics. It's also a grand act of evasion: in
the face of a severe fiscal crisis, voters are being invited to focus not on hard
choices but on personality. Replacing Gray Davis with someone more likable isn't
going to pay the bills.
And California's slide into irresponsibility, in which politicians refuse to
acknowledge any connection between the government services the public
demands and the taxes that pay for those services, is being replicated all across
America.
Thanks to the end of the tech boom and the bursting of the tech bubble with an
assist from energy price gouging California's budget has plunged into deficit.
State and local governments faced with deficits normally respond with a mix of
spending cuts and tax increases. That's what Mayor Michael Bloomberg has done
in New York, it's what Gov. Pete Wilson did in California's last fiscal crisis, in the
early 1990's, and it's what Mr. Davis proposed earlier this year.
But California's Constitution requires that budgets be passed in the State
Legislature by a two-thirds' margin which gives the Republican minority blocking
power. And that minority has refused either to vote for any tax increase, or to make
realistic proposals for spending cuts.
You often hear claims that excessive spending is responsible for California's
budget woes. True, budgets grew rapidly after the mid-1990's. But California
began the 1990's by slashing outlays in response to a fiscal crisis, and most of the
subsequent growth was simply a return to pre-crisis levels. As analysts at the
nonpartisan California Budget Project point out, real state spending per capita was
only 10 percent higher in 2002-03 than it was in 1989-90 that is, most of the
spending growth was simply a matter of keeping up with the population and
inflation.
The key factor in rising California spending has been the effort to rebuild a
crippled education system.
Proposition 13, the 1978 cap on property taxes, led to a progressive starvation of
California's once-lauded public schools. By 1994, the state had the largest class
sizes in the nation; its reading scores were on a par with Mississippi's.
Voters wanted this shameful situation remedied. Indeed, much of the recent growth
of education spending was mandated by a rather complex measure called
Proposition 98. So when conservatives denounce "runaway government spending"
in California, what they're really talking about is the effort to hire more teachers
and repair decrepit school buildings.
Still, now the state faces a huge deficit, and spending must be cut. But shouldn't
the state also seek more revenue? During California's last crisis, Governor Wilson
increased the sales tax and temporarily raised income taxes on top brackets. This
time Governor Davis proposed doing more or less the same thing but Senate
Republicans refused to go along. Their counterproposal relied entirely on
spending cuts but, tellingly, offered no specifics about what, exactly, should be
cut.
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