Econ 101?

Government economics sure are weird.

Imagine you go to the grocery store and the manager tries to convince you to pay $8 for a gallon of milk -- twice the usual price.

"But wait," he says. "I'll give you a $4 rebate for the gallon of milk, which drops the price to an affordable $4."

That sounds better. But where did the other four dollars come from?

"This is Shifty, our pickpocket. He slipped it out of your pocket as you came in. Look at it this way. I'm going to use this $4 from Shifty to subsidize someone's purchase of an $8 gallon of milk today. If you don't take the deal, I'm just going to offer it to someone else."

Which brings us to the Clark County School District.

The district plans to "invest" $4 million of your tax dollars in rooftop solar panels for as many as 20 local schools. The hope is that the photovoltaic cells may save the district $190,000 per year on its electric bills for the next 20 years -- the expected lifetime of the panels.

Do the math. The savings (even if the optimistic estimates prove accurate) won't repay the set-up costs.

But wait! The school district expects to get $1.44 million in federal stimulus funds as a reward once the first five schools are outfitted. Then, the district has been promised $1.2 million in rebate checks from NV Energy, the local electric monopoly, also upon completion of the first five installations.

Why, the district could get up to $5 million in one-time rebate checks once all 20 schools hook up their electric systems. What a savings to taxpayers!

Or is it? Don't the federal "stimulus funds" come, in the end, from the same taxpayers? And the NV Energy "rebates" -- won't the same taxpayers end up covering those costs when they pay their own home electric bills? So how is this any different from the store manager promising to "subsidize" your purchase of an $8 gallon of milk with $4 that Shifty already picked out of your other pocket?

We're also told the photovoltaic panels are more affordable now, since more are being manufactured even as demand drops due to the recession.

That's weird. Why would anyone be manufacturing more of these things even as demand drops? Are we paying additional, hidden tax subsidies for those manufacturers?

Then, as an added benefit of this scheme, the main contractors, Helix Electric and Bombard Renewable Energy, contend the project will either "keep 50 people from being laid off" or "bring people who had been laid off back to work," as electricians are paid above the prevailing wage -- roughly $50 an hour -- to perform these installations. In the process, many of those workers will receive specialized training in installing photovoltaic paneling. This is "a fantastic skill to have on the resume," enthuses Earl Ward, district manager for Helix Electric.

Wait a minute. These workers are going to be learning how to do this? They're going to be trainees? And the trainees are going to be paid more than $50 an hour?

Go read Frederic Bastiat's "What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen." How many minimum-wage private-sector jobs could have been sustained if those dollars had been left in the pockets of Southern Nevada taxpayers to spend on goods and services they might rather have spent them on?

Meantime, with hundreds of thousands of Nevadans unemployed and looking for work, we're supposed to believe the school district couldn't have found trainees willing to learn how to install photovoltaic cells for less than $50 an hour?

Yep. Government economics sure are weird.