Warren makes me tired

She doesn't just want to go in for another round of screwing up health insurance, she also wants to completely overhaul the energy and housing sectors.  As in M4A, this would involve massive amounts of taxpayers' dollars and incredibly complex tangles of laws, regulations, and brand-new government programs...for a sustainability score of 0, right off the bat.

Our local electric and gas utility is already proposing changes to radically reduce carbon emissions, including early retirement of all their coal-powered plants. The state Public Utilities Commission is asking for public comments, and I certainly have some to give them.

For housing, Warren is promising to "lower rents by 10%".  While at the same time promising under her 100% Clean Energy proposal to refurbish 4% of existing buildings and houses each year to make them "green". Supposedly this will be done through the magic of federal funding.

If I do a quick estimate, guessing that there are 150 million buildings that would be affected, with an average cost of $50,000 to upgrade each building, that would be $300 billion per year, or $0.3 trillion; $7.5 trillion over 25 years. Plus a few gazillion dollars to "decarbonize" electricity generation, and a few gazillion more to take away most of our fossil-fueled vehicles. This makes it a modest proposal, actually, compared to the multi-trillion-dollar annual cost of her Medicare for All plan.

I found this laughable:

I’ll also invest in electric vehicle charging infrastructure, including ensuring that every federal interstate highway rest stop hosts a fast-charging station by the end of my first term in office, and ensuring that charging stations are as widespread and accessible tomorrow as gas stations are today.

Given the difference in time between filling a gas tank and charging an electric vehicle (currently in the tens of minutes with Teslas, for a partial supercharge), I don't think that is going to look exactly like she thinks it will. The charging stations would have to be much more widely accessible than gas stations are today, and the sensible thing to do would be to place them mostly at peoples' destinations.

Her affordable housing plan will do little to improve my family's housing affordability or security. It would help if we weren't paying out the equivalent of another place's rent every month for health insurance, thanks in part to Senator Warren's Yes vote on the Affordable Care Act. There was, a few years back, someone who did the math and compared their monthly health insurance cost to the mortgage payment on a $400,000 house; they weren't wrong.

Happily, even if Warren were to win the Presidency, she wouldn't be able to get any of this legislated without the Democrats retaking a majority in the Senate.