A Stimulating Rate Hike

Now may be the best time to buy that new GM vehicle, what with the Total Confidence program available and of course Hyundai's Assurance Plan. Ford has apparently also followed suit.

The only American enterprise we can even consider, even consider, for stimulating our way out of perpetual debt based consumption is more consumption...and new car consumption specifically. Build more roads, create more jobs building roads, give the road workers tax breaks (subsidized by all of you) for buying new cars so they can drive on those roads on their days off.

On a tangent, let me first say that I find South Korean products substantially better than all other Asian made products. I don't have such an unfavorable regard for Hyundai cars, apparel or the few Korean made things I do own as I do with Chinese made shit.

That said, Hyundai heavy industries has bid, won, and manufactured six of SMUDs last seven bulk transformers. The seventh and only US-made transformer from Delta Star out of Chicago was about 8 months behind schedule and suffered from such poor tank fabrication that we repeatedly rejected it until they corrected its deficiencies. Perhaps that was just a one-off problem, but my point is, we can barely domestically compete with Asians on heavy machine fabrication, even after figuring the cost to ship a forty five ton piece of equipment 6,000 miles and a US engineer back and forth to witness the testing. Someday soon, we'll all be traveling to Asia to sign off on factory acceptance tests because that'll be the only place where any transformers (or anything else) will be built.

That further said, consider that SMUD didn't get any "tax incentive" for buying any Hyundai transformer. Didn't get any "Assurance Plan" that if SMUD went belly up Hyundai would pay for 9 months of transformer payments until SMUD got "back on their feet."

Nope.

So, to offset the fact that we can't buy with "Total Confidence," SMUD went to the board yesterday calling for a 9.5% rate increase by September 1, and and additional 3.5% rate increase by December 31.

You get to pay higher rates so that I, the frugal over-paid electrical engineer, will be able to save more (instead of spend more), causing a further drain on our economy. How's that for "stimulating our economy," huh?