There is a reason that WTMJ’s Charlie Sykes is one of Wisconsin’s most popular radio talk show hosts.  A successful talk show host gathers the information and presents it in a way that is both entertaining and informative to the listener. In A Nation of Moochers:  America’s Addiction To Getting Something For Nothing, Sykes brings his radio host’s skill to writing an indictment of the present state of American culture.

This is not a cheerful book. Dorothy does not click her heels together three times to return to Kansas, nor will wishful thinking suddenly return us to the days of Calvin Coolidge. The assessment of our culture is bleak.

It is the culture, not just our economic situation. While the book is a dismal narrative of statistics detailing the economic impact, the net result of the great expansion of the modern welfare state under both Republicans and Democrats has been to create a culture of dependency, a nation of moochers.

Who are the moochers? As Richard Nixon would have said, we are all moochers now. Moocherism is bipartisan, even nonpartisan, and reaches into every socioeconomic strata.

From Hollywood movie moguls demanding subsidies to pay for movie star contracts to homeowners demanding bailouts for mortgages they could never afford. From free breakfast programs in schools from affluent neighborhoods to Archer Daniels Midland seeking ethanol subsidies. From state employees expecting taxpayers to pay for lavish retirement and health benefits, to middle class college students applying for food stamps. As Walt Kelly’s Pogo said, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” Our lust for Other People’s Money is only limited by our relative “suckage.”

Competition shifts from the marketplace to lobbying the government for financial boons. My favorite example from Sykes’ book was the decision by Disney to pursue $200 million in government subsidies to promote tourism. If there is any corporation in America that seems to thrive under capitalism, it would be Disney. Yet as we saw recently, the President of the United States made the pilgrimage to Disneyworld to promote tourism.

Ironically, it was President Obama who single-handedly damaged tourism in Las Vegas when he called for corporations to stop holding conventions there. The trouble with crony capitalism is that you never know when you’ll cease to be the favored crony.

Sykes walks us through the bailout of AIG to show how turning corporations into moochers, deeming them “too big to fail,” is ultimately corrupting to the political process. On all sides of the negotiations concerning the failure were representatives and former representatives of politically connected Goldman Sachs. Conflicts of interests were swirling in the room, and AIG’s bailout broke new ground by placing the full risk on the taxpayers. Goldman Sachs took away $13 billion.

The justification for the bailouts was a yawning financial abyss that impended if the government did not take immediate action to stabilize the markets. It’s an appeal that even reaches conservatives. However, had conservatives in Washington known of the cost culturally, would they have reluctantly agreed to the bailouts? Had they been able to envision the bankruptcy lawyers advertising, “the big banks got their bailouts, now get yours,” would the possible financial breakdown been more endurable? We may never know, but the nation is paying the cultural costs of those bailouts now.

But what is a corporation, or a state, or even an individual, supposed to do? If the federal government is collecting from all of us with one hand, borrowing money with the other, and “making it rain” with a third, should we be surprised when everyone starts buying buckets to collect? Should we be shocked when the ethos of our age changes from, “Ask not what your country can do for you,” to, “Where’s mine?”

From there we are set on the road to ruin, despotism, and even “serfdom” in Hayek’s phrase.

It isn’t hard to predict the course we are headed. The financial ruins of Greece are just ahead. We can point to other historical economic calamities as our future, such as Latin America in the 1970s. Further back in time, and we can see the political corrosion of dependency, as when Julius Caesar bought the masses to ensure his popularity. He was ultimately stopped, but by then it was too late for the Republic.

It’s impossible to read A Nation of Moochers without seeing the context of our times. Indeed, Sykes does not shy from engaging current controversies. The battles with Wisconsin’s government employee unions are featured prominently in, “The Moocher Empire Strikes Back.” Sykes puts Wisconsin’s struggle into perspective by reminding us that other states do not allow public employees to collectively bargain at all. Sykes quotes columnist Jeff Jacoby, “democracy, fundamental rights, and freedom were doing just fine in all of them.”

Sykes asks early in the book if the nation is at a tipping point. Can we bring the country back from one of patronage to one of entrepreneurship? Is it too late to stop the mooching? After a dip in the dystopian pond of Ayn Rand (mercifully brief), Sykes says the challenge is to “step away from the trough.”

”…the revolution against Moocherism requires redefining our expectations of what others owe to us and what we owe to ourselves. Put bluntly, we need to restore some of the stigma to mooching,” he writes.

The unanswered question is whether Sykes’ prescription is a little like the doctor telling the patient dying of lung cancer to give up smoking. We may learn this year if the tipping point has already passed us by.

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ZBB Energy, a Menomonee Falls based green energy company, is in a race to bring new green technologies to market as it finds itself in the center of the debate over whether government financial assistance can launch and sustain a green economy here in the United States.

President Obama visited ZBB Energy back in August of 2010 to promote the green economy and why the federal government should step in to get this sector of the economy off the ground.

“At this plant you’re doing more than making high-tech batteries.  You’re pointing the country towards a brighter economic future,” Obama said.

During his visit, President Obama vowed to create 800,000 green energy jobs by 2012.

ZBB Energy makes batteries specifically designed to store electricity from renewable sources. At least, that’s the plan.  ZBB Energy is in the middle of a major overhaul and currently does not have any products on the market. It plans to launch a new line within weeks.

“The product we’re developing will be the only storage device like it in the world,” Will Hogoboom, CFO, told MacIver News. “We’ve already closed orders for the new product even though it’s not in production.”

Investors and the stock market have not always appeared to share in the President’s optimism.  ZBB Energy stock ended the year at 71 cents a share. The day of Obama’s visit, the stock closed at $.70. Some believe investors are generally weary of green energy companies, especially startups, because these companies have high risk: they incur high overhead and generate low revenue while they attempt to develop new technologies that may or may not be profitable.

That’s where federal and state governments step in, providing those companies with massive tax breaks and loans. Many companies state in their SEC filings they could not survive without this preferred treatment. However, as we’ve seen, government favoritism is not a guarantee of success.

Solyndra, a solar panel manufacturer in California, received a $535 million loan guarantee from the Department of Energy in 2009. Two years later the company was out of business.

ZBB Energy has received significantly less help from the federal government than Solyndra. In June, the IRS awarded it a $14.7 million Clean Energy Tax Credit.  In 2009 it received a $1.3 million stimulus loan.

The stock market has been a consistent challenge for ZBB Energy. In December 2010, AMEX notified ZBB its shareholders’ equity was below the minimum $4 million required to continue being listed. This December, the company announced its shareholders equity was at $4.1 million and it was back in compliance.

However, ZBB’s stock still trends downward. It closed at $5.80 on June 18, 2007, three days after the company executed a 1:17 reverse split. Since then, it’s been downhill. On December 20, 2011 it closed at 74 cents a share and has not broken $1/share since September.

Courtesy of NASDAQ.com

ZBB’s market trouble is reflected in its SEC reports. Its Q3 revenue was at $1.637 million. ZBB’s payroll alone was $60,000 more than that. The total operating loss was $1.696 million.

The company hopes to turn all this around with the release of a new line of batteries, which are in the final stage of testing.

“Once we start actually producing and shipping, it will mean the world to us,” Hogoboom said.

The company has also added a number of new employees. At the time of its overhaul two years ago, ZBB employed 25 people. Today it employs about 60 people and has 7 open positions.

Over the past few months, while developing its new product, the company has also been forging new partnerships. In fact ZBB is opening a new factory in China in the next few weeks.

On December 15th, ZBB announced a new joint venture partnership with an unnamed “global technology company,” to help in product development. That partner is investing $800,000 in the project, and bought $700,000 of ZBB stock.

Company insiders appear to be confident. Hogoboom bought 14,000 shares on December 13. Buoyed by the government investment in the firm, investors purchased 1,307,860 shares over the last six months, all at market value.

To achieve President Obama’s goal to create 800,000 green energy jobs by 2012, the federal government has invested heavily in companies like ZBB. Yet, there is presently no official way to verify the success of such job creation efforts since the Labor Department does not track green jobs. The Bureau of Labor Statistics is in the process of conducting a survey to find out exactly how many green jobs there are in the country and hopes to have that complete by the middle of this year.

Meanwhile, announced expansion projects, a new product line, and large stock purchases have not been enough to give non governmental investors in the market confidence in this green energy “startup.” ZBB’s stock opened at 78 cents a share on December 15, 2011 and closed at 81 cents a share on Jan. 13, 2012.

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Click on the full article from the Heritage Foundation here

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In part, Healy wrote:

With Wisconsin stuck in the middle of the highly charged “recall season,” those on the left immediately seized upon this waiver in an attempt to maximize political damage. But what they conveniently forget to mention in this attack is that the program is broke and in need of a fix. What is their plan? Is it the plan suggested by the Obama administration?

In a February 2011 letter from Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, the Obama administration suggested the option of ending eligibility for 53,000 non-disabled, non-elderly and non-pregnant adults on Medicaid with income above 133% of FPL. This, the feds say, would save the state over $60 million of general purpose revenue a year. While I personally agree with this approach, the left in Wisconsin would certainly be apoplectic if DHS attempted this one-size-fits-all remedy.

If Wisconsin is granted the waiver, only individuals who refuse to pay the 5% premium, who have access to affordable employer-sponsored coverage, who fail to prove they are Wisconsin residents or who make too much money to qualify would be kicked out of the program.

In between when the column was written and when it was published, the Federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services preliminarily approved parts of Wisconsin’s waiver request.  However, CMS said “it is unlikely we will be able to meet the State’s requested approval date of December 31, 2011, for all the proposed changes.”

They did approve e the following proposals as applied to non-disabled, non-pregnant adults with income above 133 percent of the Federal Poverty Level

• Application of the 9.5% affordability test with respect to employer sponsored insurance that meets minimum benefit standards;
• Premium increase for the adult family members up to 5% of family income (this item, as proposed by the State, would be for non-disabled, non-pregnant adults with income above 150% of the FPL); and
• A 12-month restrictive re-enrollment period for Medicaid eligibility for the adults who fail to make a premium payment.

The Walker Administration continues to push for the full waiver application, but if the feds reuse to budge, the stalemate will likely force their hand to disenroll individuals in the manner by which the Obama Administration is suggesting.

Read Healy’s whole column, here.

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