Desperate Mark Kirk Stole an Old Old Old Idea to Sell TVA Like a Chicago Parking Meter. Ignores New Positive Uses of TVA. Wants to Create Enron-Like Privatization/Deregulation of Energy.

After years of deficit spending on war for power and fun, and borrowing from China, Mark Kirk is a fiscal hawk. That's what he wants us to believe anyway. Alexi Giannoulias says Kirk's new hawk claim might be Kirk's "biggest whopper" and it probably is.

Mark Kirk would most assuredly vote with his party to privatize and ultimately destroy Social Security and Medicare. He always votes with his party when they need him. However, Kirk does not want to own the ownership society now because he knows the truth would lose the election for him. He ducked the matter on Meet the Press yesterday by claiming to have come up with his own budget cuts rather than the well advertised republican plan to cut government programs that help people.

His big idea to save us all from deficit doom is to sell off, privatize the Tennessee Valley Authority. That's the federal utility company set up by FDR as part of the stimulus to bring the country out of the Great Depression of the 1930s, it's a symbol of the New Deal.

Thing is, the cut isn't Kirk's idea at all. It was Barry Goldwater's idea in 1964. See here too. It was so unpopular, that Goldwater had to stop campaigning on it. McCain dredged it up for the 2008 election and we all saw how well it served him.

As a policy move itself, selling off the TVA is the ultimate in energy privatization. The COB looked at the idea again back in 1997 and concluded that consumers would suffer higher costs and private utilities would get a windfall. CBO also studied the effect of the sale on the deficit and concluded it would bring no long term budgetary savings:

The prospect of using the proceeds from sales of federal power assets to help control the nation's budget has encouraged proposals to privatize all or parts of the program. But the sale of a revenue-producing asset--even one that may operate more efficiently with new ownership--might not yield budgetary savings over the long term. Selling such assets is tantamount to trading the future income that those assets could produce for a lump-sum payment today. The future income from the government's power program would equal the difference between program receipts (from power sales) and outlays (for operation and construction). A sale of federal assets produces long-term budgetary savings only if the sale price exceeds the present value of the income that the government gives up, less any increase in federal tax receipts after the sale. 

CBO also found that that the only economically viable way to sell off federal energy companies like TVA would be to remove all regulation, Enron-style.

The me the whole thing sounds familiar. It's the larger version of Mayor Daley's yard sale of parking meters in Chicago, now universally acknowledged as a bad idea.

Further, TVA is not just a power company. TVA also controls reservoirs that control flooding and preserve the habitats of threatened, endangered, or commercially important species. Private companies would not be interested in these non-profit making, but important ventures. TVA has also implemented some alternate energy ideas including wind energy and renewable generators. All that would be lost to private, corporate profits in a privatization scheme.

Selling off the TVA will do little to reduce the deficit and remove from the American people a valuable asset that could be used to roll out future clean and efficient energy. All Mark Kirk is saying with this proposal is that he wants to symbolically end the historic New Deal in order to pave the way for the cuts he denies supporting, cutting Social Security and Medicare.

So, was Mark Kirk reviewing campaign platforms from 1964 to formulate his economic plan? I doubt it. Giving away the TVA to private energy companies is probably an agenda item for the energy industry and they are probably among the secret donors to Karl Rove's group, American Crossroads, now supporting Mark Kirk with false anti-Giannoulias ads.