Yes, it's amazing. You look at a map and find that all of California's neighboring states have power and no rolling blackouts, no threatened bankruptcies. It's as if California were a 3rd world nation (think of brown outs and black outs, think the Philippines!!!) rather than a state in a federal republic.
The source of their pain is very simple--they wanted a one way street when energy was getting cheaper. They deregulated so that utilities could buy power in an unregulated environment, and therefore take advantage of $12 oil and $2 gas, but legislated that the utilities, even if faced with higher costs, could not pass that on to the electorate. It's as if all the legislators in charge had absolutely no clue about commodity prices. Wait a sec: all the legislators had absolutely no clue about commodity prices.
So, who was/is the beneficiary of this program? Easy. The people of California who had a tails-I-win, head-you-lose relationship (they thought) with their power providers. So who should pay to get them out of this mess? Easy. The people of California, by paying higher than "fair" utility costs until their utilities are solvent again and they can move on to real deregulation (utilities buy the cheapest possible energy and sell it on to their consumers.
Any regional or federal bailout of the situation is patently unfair, as it would burden the rest of the nation with one state's private utitility bills. Further it would reward stupidity.
Remember the Arizona electric car (or whatever) program they enacted, granting huge cash bonuses to people who would buy these cars? Within a month or so the state treasury was facing bankruptcy, but no one suggested that, perhaps, Iowa, would like to tax its people to get Arizona out of a jam. |
