President Obama’s much-delayed budget put an idea on the table almost no one was expecting: selling the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1933 monument to “creeping socialism,” as President Dwight Eisenhower was to later call it.
There is, of course, only one rational response to Obama’s suggestion: sell it now! And if the government can’t sell it, then give it away.
The government-owned and managed TVA provides power to 9 million people in parts of seven southeastern states. According to Bloomberg News, the TVA is wallowing in $25.5 billion in debt, and could hit its debt limit of $30 billion soon.
Bloomberg quotes the Obama administration as saying, “When we’re looking for new revenue, we’re going to look under every rock possible. One of those rocks is the government has is assets it could sell [sic].”
That’s a switcheroo for the Obama administration, which usually only looks for new revenue under the tax-the-rich rock.
But some Republicans have also done a role reversal: both Republican senators from Tennessee and some members of the House are raising concerns about the sale. The only reason we can think of is that the TVA is a pork barrel jobs program in their districts and they don’t want to give up control.
That is precisely the kind of big-government thinking that got Republicans in trouble from 2001 to 2007, when they controlled both the White House and Congress.
Our only question is why stop with the TVA? If the Obama administration is looking for money-losing ventures that could go on the auction block, there are many others.
Can we start with Amtrak? It lost about $1.3 billion in 2011.
How about the U.S. Post Office? It lost about $16 billion in the last fiscal year.
And the federal government owns or leases between 55,000 and 77,000 vacant properties—apparently no one knows for sure—that could save taxpayers between $3 billion and $8 billion a year if we got rid of them.
Even if the government can’t make money on the deals, selling these “assets” would at least help stop the bleeding. After four long years the Obama administration has finally come up with a good idea. It just doesn’t go far enough.
April 23, 2013