An Imbalanced Look At "Cash For Caulkers"

Guest blogged by Brian

On Thursday’s (11/18/09) Your World, regular guest Dave Ramsey bashed a possible Cash for Caulkers program encouraging homeowners to make their homes more energy efficient. The program is expected to create hundreds of thousands of jobs, save homeowners money and help the environment. But on Your World, it was presented as an evil program and ridiculed as a “piece of crap.” With video.

Ramsey told an unquestioning host, Neil Cavuto, "These people (the Obama administration) are crazy. They are absolutely crazy. Twenty three billion to get people to do what they should be doing anyway. ‘Cause if you put in caulk and you've got good windows, and you insulate your stinking house, your heat bill goes down… We're going to …prop this thing up and try to get a few people in the home improvement business rich really, really quick.

What we're training people to do… is to count on the government for everything that's good. And …this nanny state mentality, it’s a bad emotional place to get to. It's a much better place to get to, to face your obstacles, overcome your obstacles, go into the marketplace and win. It gives you dignity. When you have to wait on the state to motivate you, you don't have dignity… Somebody's got to pay for this crap."

Comment: Efficiency First wrote, “The HOME STAR program leverages private investment to enable a robust national market for home energy retrofits that would put hundreds of thousands of unemployed Americans back to work. The program also would stimulate demand for building materials produced by American factories. A $23 billion investment in HOME STAR incentives would support 5.9 million residential energy retrofits and quickly create more than 500,000 new local jobs in construction and related industries.” That information was not given to the “we report, you decide” network. There was nobody on the segment to speak in support of the program. Are 500,000 new jobs crap? No way. Is helping the environment crap? No way. Presenting this segment as “fair and balanced” is crap.