Making a bad idea much worse

I don't know about you, but to me that Portland "clean energy tax," which is collected from big retailers who pass it on to us consumers, stinks to high heaven. It's created a $100 million-a-year City Hall slush fund that's being handed out as grants to the usual suspects in the "nonprofit" industrial complex, to be burned on God knows what-all. 

The latest report on the program, here, lays out the pork flow beginning on page 11, and for the life of me I can't figure out what a lot of it has to do with clean energy. As I reported a couple of weeks ago, one of the biggest of this year's grants is going toward a building that apparently doesn't even have drawings yet.

But now, the City Council member nominally in charge, Carmen "Chainsaw" Rubio, fresh off the embarrassment of having to back out a grant to a convicted con artist, has grand plans to change the program. Among other things, Rubio would more than double the City Hall overhead to administer it; allow money to be handed out directly to private companies, thus eliminating even the charade of "nonprofit" benefit; and have the city start making loans as well as doling out grants. To the sheep at the Weed, it's "sweeping reform." To any person not excessively microdosing, it's even smellier trash than what the city's voters naïvely approved.

Rubio's colleague and fellow box-checker extraordinaire, Jo Ann With the Bullhorn, immediately piped up in in support of the proposal. That makes sense. I'm sure a few of JAWTB's buddies are already enjoying the "clean energy" gravy. And how long will it be before she's back on the outside of City Hall looking in, and asking for one of these loosey-goosey handouts for herself?

I see they've quietly changed the name of the thing, too. Now it's the "Clean Energy Community Benefits Fund." The "community benefits" part must be code for admitting that they're simply enriching the politicians' pals. Rubio, who's been hacking around in local government for decades, has learned the game pretty well.

Anyway, her latest proposals take a bad system and make it much worse. They're such spectacularly misguided ideas that they're virtually guaranteed to be approved by the City Council. The three guys sitting next to her should know better, but at least one of them won't risk bucking the almighty "nonprofits."