“Hey Jon, what’s going on with energy policy these days?

Oh hey there! I’m glad you asked. Our Energy Policy Center director Amy Oliver has been hitting the energy and environment issues hard lately. You should take a look at our Energy Policy Center’s webpage to stay on top of Amy and Michael Sandoval’s work. For example, when President Obama came to town to talk about his “comprehensive” view of energy, Amy and Michael put together a nice article translating his rhetoric into real life language – that real people speak! Additionally, Amy sat down with my main minion Justin Longo to discuss Obama’s energy policies and figure out how his “green” energy favoritism gets twisted into an “all of the above” approach he claims to have. You can hear Amy translate and discuss Obama’s energy policies here on iVoices.org.

Let’s bring energy policy even closer to home shall we? Amy and Michael also tackled the upcoming energy legislation before our Colorado representatives in this year’s legislative session. What’s some of the good? What’s some of the bad? And you know there’s going to be some downright ugly when it comes to energy policy in Colorado… so what’s that all about this year? Amy gives a run down of some of the more important legislation in this iVoices.org podcast with Justin. You might be surprised at how great some of the good stuff is. (Hint: Rep. Spencer Swalm is on an energy tear this year!) Likewise, the bad will bad and the ugly… expensive.

Our good friends over at Americans for Prosperity (AFP) have a great new project called Monkey Wrenching America. I encourage you to check it out, as it’s the first effort I’ve seen focused entirely on exposing the professional “green” energy agenda. Many groups are taking up the cause of free markets in energy. AFP however is going to tackle exposing the well-paid left-wing groups who use the media, the court of public opinion, actual courts, and the hammer of government to destroy our already beaten down domestic “dirty” energy industries. Here’s how AFP describes their project against monkeying with our energy industry:

Monkey-Wrenching America was created to document the danger professional green extremists pose to America’s economy, limited government ideals and freedom-oriented way of life. The economic, fiscal, judicial and human costs of green monkey-wrenching activities aren’t as well-documented as they should be, because the establishment media becomes an unabashed cheerleader where the environmental movement is concerned. This website, and the stories and reports it hosts, will help document these excesses and bring some balance and reason to the public debate about environmental issues.

Be sure to check out their Wall of Shame. It’s going to be a great way to document the special interest groups who oppose low energy costs.

UCCS Professor Joshua Dunn can’t help himself. He can’t believe the audacity of Denver District Court Judge Sheila Rappaport’s decision in the epic saga we know as the Lobato case. He’s been sounding the alarm on this ruling ever since it came down last month. If you haven’t heard Professor Dunn’s argument yet, here are a couple great resources. First, you can listen to our iVoices.org podcast featuring Professor Dunn and our Education Policy analyst Ben DeGrow. They hit the airwaves shortly after Judge Rappaport’s ruling came down. Additionally, Joshua wrote an op-ed for us that hit the Colorado Springs Gazette’s opinion pages last night. In both venues, Professor Dunn argues that Judge Rappaport disregarded the totality of our state constitution when deciding the Lobato case. Instead, she chose just the sections that suited her worldview and threw out all the inconvenient stuff. Joshua says her decision was entirely political, not constitutional.

AG John Suthers sat in front of the Joint Budget Committee yesterday to discuss the Lobato case and its potential time frame. He indicated that he believed it could be a full year before we’ve reached any resolution. That seems hardly adequate considering we’re dealing with a large chunk of the state’s budget. How can we plan for the future when Lobato threatens to eat away a majority of our general fund?

We’ve all heard about the Solyndra scandal, but have you heard about the Lowenstein Project? Wait, you didn’t know you had the Lowenstein “investment” in your portfolio? Didn’t know you made a loan that was never repaid? Me neither.

In an op-ed the Reason Foundation’s Harris Kenny wrote for us that landed on the pages of the Denver Post, we learn about Colorado’s version of corporate welfare gone crazy. (side note: Abound Solar will be next). Harris describes the filthy process that starts with an idea and ends with taxpayers getting hosed for millions of dollars. I find it odd that politicians discover these great “investment opportunities” and can only come up with other people’s money to use as capital…

Here’s the takeaway:

Government-issued loans are often based on insider favoritism and politics. They rarely fulfill their supposed purpose of the public good. The companies that receive government welfare are given an unfair advantage over those that don’t. Corporate welfare encourages companies to be good at politics, instead of good at business.

Christmas is the time of year for giving. For example, I’ve been giving myself seconds and thirds at all the holiday parties I’ve gone to. (I’m still accepting invitations through the rest of this week). Amy Oliver and Michael Sandoval have been hard at work the past month giving the world a much needed dose of reality when it comes to “green” energy. Remember this article and this one? Those were just the tip of the iceberg. Amy and Michael have no plans to stop their crusade to give every green energy advocate a headache for Christmas. Their latest piece on Townhall.com goes further into the wilderness of green energy fallacies with, “Green Technology that Pollutes the Planet.” Turns out, green energy is the gift that keeps on giving.

Keeping with the theme of green fallacies, another great enviro-lie is that hydraulic fracturing is a boogeyman that sneaks into your house at night and contaminates your drinking water. As with all distortions of reality, a lie repeated often enough eventually becomes “true.” The latest opportunity for anti-fracking fanatics to re-tell their scare story came from an EPA report on groundwater contamination in Wyoming. Predictably, the enviros jumped on this AP story and screamed to the heavens, “SEE! We told you fracking is dangerous!!!!”

Umm…. guys, did you read the report?

Unfortunately for the loony Left, our intern Donovan Schafer did. He found that the Wyoming report did not indict fracking as the Left would have you believe, but rather, exonerated fracking. In this op-ed published in the Colorado Springs Gazette last week, Donovan goes into detail how the Wyoming report concluded that fracking is safe. Here’s a snippet,

So was any drinking water contaminated, and is anyone’s health at risk? The results from the 51 domestic wells respond with a resounding “No!”

There you have it folks. A couple more green energy gifts from us at the Independence to you.

Here we go again. The Left’s latest attempt to defame the Tea Party movement appears in the latest issue of Vanity Fair magazine. In the article, “Debt and Dumb,” the authors distort the founding era record and our Constitution to vilify Tea Partiers. As we’ve seen recently, the Constitution is back in vogue and even the Left is using it to further their big government agenda. (”What’d the founders think? Well, look at Hamilton!”)

Um, okay. Let’s look at him.

Rob Natelson deconstructs the Vanity Fair article in this constitution.i2i.org blogpost. As Rob notes, VF does a great job revising history to fit their beliefs. Over on iVoices.org, Rob sits down with one of my minions to talk about the VF article and why it’s dead wrong. Podcast here.

I bet you’ve long wondered how Colorado funds its K-12 education. Well, wonder no more my friends. If you’ve got a spare 20 minutes, I encourage to listen to our Education Policy Center’s Ben DeGrow break the whole thing down here. While you’re listening you can follow along with a PowerPoint presentation as well. Audio alone stinks. Visual alone stinks. Put them together and you get an audio/visual awesome sandwich!

In the constant struggle for taxpayer dollars, there exists one big budget item that tends to get lost in shuffle: Medicaid.

Medicaid plays a particularly cruel trick on state budgets. As the economy takes a turn for the worse, revenues coming into the government decline. Coloradans are making less money and paying less in taxes. In turn, poorer Coloradans means more of us on government rolls – like Medicaid. With more people applying for Medicaid benefits, the strain on government’s smaller revenue stream becomes greater and greater. It’s a vicious cycle that doesn’t seem to excite newspaper reporters like declining funds for K-12 education seems to.

As rare as a good Medicaid lead story is, the Durango Herald’s Joe Hanel did a great job of reporting on what many consider a rather unsexy news story. Here is something to be concerned with,

An extra 281,000 people will join the Medicaid rolls between 2007, when the downturn began, and next year, the state predicts. That’s an increase of 72 percent in just six years.

Ouch. A 72% increase would require some extra funding right Joe?

Although next year’s budget is growing slightly, higher Medicaid expenses will eat up all of the growth and more, putting the squeeze on schools, colleges and the rest of government.

Double ouch! See, it’s a perpetuating cycle. The question is: what can we do about it? Some would suggest more taxes and fees. Some want more taxes masquerading as fees. But that only addresses the revenue side of the equation. And increasing revenues means taking more from the struggling private sector – the sector that actually creates jobs. What about the cost side of the equation? It is here where Hanel quotes our Health Care Policy Center director Linda Gorman,

Also, the state can ask for specific waivers from federal Medicaid rules, Gorman said. In fact, Colorado already has 11 waivers, but they usually let the state expand coverage in a more cost-effective way than federal rules allow, not reduce coverage. Gorman thinks the state needs to be more creative about asking for waivers that would let it run its programs more economically.

To hear more Linda Gorman on the crushing weight of Medicaid expansion, check out my TV show from a few weeks back.

In her newest article for Townhall.com, Amy Oliver asks an important question: can you be an advocate for the poor AND for “green” energy simultaneously? Her answer is: absolutely not.

Poverty rates have been rising over the last decade. Even in states like ours that claim to be renewable energy meccas.

…Colorado, home of the New Energy Economy and an aggressive renewable energy mandate, now has 40,000 fewer jobs than in 2000 with 900,000 more residents, the highest rates of unemployment in 28 years, and the median salary remains at the same level it was in 2000. The wage gap is considerable between black and Hispanic households, which make $20,000 less than the state’s median household income of $54,000.

No question, times are tough. Especially for the poorest folks among us. This makes for a rock/hard place situation for those on the Left. They promote themselves as champions of the poor and downtrodden. They claim to be the voice for the voiceless. Yet at the same time, they push aggressively for green energy in America. These positions become diametrically opposed when you consider the effects of our green energy policies.

Take for example our renewable energy mandate (RPS). The mandate in Colorado is 30%. This means that 30% of the electric power in our state must come from renewables. Whether you want it or not and whether you can afford it or not is beside the point. You’re paying a good chunk of your income for someone else’s wind and solar fantasies. This acts like a regressive tax on the poor. Why? Well, I’ll let Amy explain.

From 2011 to 2020, the RPS “will cost Colorado citizens an additional $11.78 billion over conventional power. By 2020, the RPS will force working families to an average of $337 more per year. By 2020, the RPS will cost commercial businesses an average of $2,360 per year. By 2020, the RPS will cost industrial businesses an average of $43,367 per year.

Renewable energy is simply not efficient. Unfortunately, our renewable energy mandate forces the least capable of us to fork over more of their money for energy. In many cases, it’s nothing more than a wealth transfer from poor to rich. How can you say you care about the poor when you force high energy costs on them en masse?

The working poor cannot afford this green agenda. The unemployed cannot afford this green agenda. If you want jobs in Colorado, the last thing you should want is green energy.

By 2020 “Colorado will lose an average of 18,380 jobs. Wages will be reduced by an average of $1,269 per worker. Total “annual real disposable income will fall by $1.87 billion.

That doesn’t sound very poor-friendly does it?

By now we’ve had some time to reflect on the beating the Prop 103 tax increase received from Colorado voters a couple weeks ago. It’s pretty amazing isn’t it? We were outspent around 6 to 1 but we managed to destroy the tax hike nearly 2 to 1. Granted, Prop 103 probably would have gone down even if we did nothing, but our side working well together ensured that the beating would resonate for a long time. Like I told Colorado Peak Politics, this tax hike unified us and instead of embarrassing ourselves like we normally do, we worked together to embarrass the enemies of limited government. It proved that we can work together for a common cause. Let Prop 103’s gross failure be our guiding light for the future.

Let’s talk about that future.

Senior Fellow Penn Pfiffner was a guest on the Tax Foundation’s podcast show the other day to talk about Prop 103’s failure and what we need to do to fortify our state against the barrage of calls for bigger and bigger government. Yes, it’s heartening to score such a resounding victory against big government, but it wasn’t the first proposed tax increase and it certainly won’t be the last. It’s a matter of time until we hear about the next government expansion “for the kids.” Likewise, it won’t be long until we hear the next round of sob stories that are designed to pry open our wallets. One victory will not shut down the Left’s super highway into our bank accounts. Penn knows this and does a good job of explaining that we must change our tactics if we are to ensure long-term success. As long as we continue to play only defense, it’s just a matter of time until they break off a big play and dance in our end zone. Even a good defense has holes and weaknesses. Stopping 99% of scoring drives means that 1% are getting through. Therefore, it doesn’t hurt to be on offense every now and again. As the old saying goes, sometimes the best defense is a good offense. Just ask Tom Brady and Bill Belichick.