Daily Kos: A Failed Experiment:
by rss@dailykos.com (teacherken)
In upper-middle-class suburbs on the East Coast, the newest must-have isn’t a $7,500 Sub-Zero refrigerator. It’s a standby generator that automatically flips on backup power to an entire house when the electrical grid goes out.
. So begin
this New York Times op ed by Nicholas Kristof. He starts with this imagery, explaining why increasingly those well-off are turning to such generators after a series of failures of our aging electric grid. Such systems can cost over $10,000, but he is a bit less critical after his family lost power for 12 days after Sandy. More than 3% of homes worth more than $100,000 now have such generators.But this image serves as an exemplar, or perhaps a metaphor, for how those with means are responding the real failure. The main producer of such systems has seen business boom, to which Kristof responds:
That’s how things often work in America. Half-a-century of tax cuts focused on the wealthiest Americans leave us with third-rate public services, leading the wealthy to develop inefficient private workarounds.
Rather than the wealthy each having such a system it would be more efficient to simply fix the electrical grid to
