Just One Dollar

I was looking through a sampling of the more than HALF A TRILLION DOLLAR$ handed out in Federal Grants and saw a curious grant.

Energent Corporation of Santa Ana in the People’s Republik of Kalifornia was awarded a grant of ONE DOLLAR for “Renewable Energy Research and Development“. What? How much research and or development can a corporation do with ONE DOLLAR?

Energent is a company that, according to their website, “… invents and develops technology to harvest the power lost from waste energy resources. By utilizing our technical expertise and state of the art facilities and equipment, Energent has presented revolutionary turbine technology and pioneering power cycles.

I searched for their financials but came up empty. Interestingly they are a company under the umbrella of Cryogenic Industries. Cryogenic operates out of Kalifornia and Basel, Switzerland. Okay nothing strange in that sort of arrangement.

What was interesting was Cryogenic Industries was sold lock, stock, and barrel, to a Japanese company, Nikkiso International Co., Ltd. last year. The estimated value of the takeover was $440 million, almost a HALF BILLION DOLLAR$.

Though it’s only ONE DOLLAR, why did the US GOVERNMENT give any money to a company that was acquired by a foreign entity, who obviously valued their worth at nearly HALF A BILLION DOLLAR$ ???

On top of the mysterious ONE DOLLAR GRANT, how many more dollars do you think was spent in administration costs to oversee and manage that ONE DOLLAR GRANT?  Someone had to read the grant request.  Someone needed to present the request to a committee.  The committee needed to approve the grant.  The execution of the money transfer to the corporation would be handled by yet one more government group.  Eventually someone would need to track the status of the grant and read the summary of the work accomplished under the grant.  I’d estimate that at least TEN PEOPLE were involved.  If they only took 30 MINUTES to do everything, that’s FIVE MAN-HOURS.  At the wasteful TRUE government rate of $200 per hour, I’d estimate that it cost YOU the American Taxpayer about ONE THOUSAND DOLLAR$ to give away that ONE DOLLAR.

One thought on “Just One Dollar”

Leave a Reply to Steven W Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *