By Rick Manning and Rebekah Rast – As if the U.S. Department of Energy’s Solyndra scandal wasn’t enough for American taxpayers, the U.S. Department of Agriculture decided to jump on the bandwagon of bad tax dollar investments as well.
This bad investment was a USDA-backed biofuels plant in Soperton, Georgia, that was sold recently for “pennies on the dollar to another bio-fuel maker with equally grand plans to transform the alternative energy world.” All in all, it ended up costing taxpayers about $65 million in federal and state tax dollars.
Tom Pyle, president of Institute for Energy Research (IER), responded in a press release saying:
“At this rate, Uncle Sam may be outpacing Bernie Madoff when it comes to fraudulent investment schemes and zeroed-out portfolios. The Department of Agriculture, like the Department of Energy, should be held accountable for this abusive waste of taxpayer money.”
This is yet further proof that President Obama and his team should not be using public monies to play venture socialist. In the real world, if a venture capitalist invests unwisely, the person who made the bad decision gets hammered financially.
In Obama’s continuing saga of nightmare alternative energy bets, it is the taxpayer who gets hammered while the social schemers who put the money at risk get to roll the dice again and again.
The only question is how much more taxpayer money does team Obama need to lose before the people decide enough is enough and demand an end to government offering tax dollars as an offering to the green religion of the left?