Rick Santorum's Price: $7,750

Angelica Oung argues that Senator Rick Santorum's price is only $7,750:

Ezra Klein: Cheap as well as nasty: By now we've all heard about Rick Santorum's bill seeking to prevent the National Weather Service from actually sharing weather forecasts with Americans. You see, that 'socialized weather' business has got to stop. It's taking the bread right out of the mouths of private web-based forecast providers who work so hard to make a profit by repackaging that information the NWS just want to give away for free. One such firm is Accuweather, which just so happens to be based in Pennsylvania, just like the good senator. Fancy that.

[T]hroughout 2003 and 2004, both Joel and Barry Myers have donated nearly $2,750 to Santorum's 2006 re-election efforts. Public records also showed that since 1999, the Senator received nearly $5,000 in contributions from AccuWeather executives, raising questions of whether the company attempted to court favor with the Senator through campaign contributions.

Count it up...$2,750+$5,000=$7,750. For a blatant gimme bill introduced in congress? That's what I call value!

The Republicans should be able to find a senate candidate in Pennsylvania whose price is at least $100,000! Where are standards these days?

Comments

[Thomas Ware]

I thought it lives in Virginia.

[rjh]

The bill is S.786 for those who want to actually read it.

The issue is a long running one over what is the proper dividing line between government public service weather forecasts and private forecasts. For example, I know that one shipyard that does repairs is accessible via a narrow channel. Since the ships being repaired travel empty, they have a high profile and act like sails. For safety reasons you need detailed 6-12 hr advance forecasts of cross winds at that channel, tailored to the speeds of interest for the current repair jobs.

Question: Should they get those custom forecasts for free from the government or should they pay for those forecasts?

One of the longest running grey zones has been public access to raw weather data and to the raw output from the computer simulation models. There have been times when this cost money and was licensed, and therefore only available to private forecasters. For quite a while this was used to partially fund the weather service. With the advent of dirt cheap Internet access it has been made free to the public. This saves the private forecasters the fees, but opens them up to widespread low cost competition from amateurs and self-forecasters. On the whole, the private forecasters preferred the old pay for access system.

[ogmb]

Can we also stop the municipalities from piping high quality drinking water into every household for almost nothing? I'm sure the Dasanis and Aquafinas of the world would prefer to do without this low cost competition.

[elizabeth_a]

People talk all the time about how much money is spent on buying congress. Sum told, its a trivial amount compared to our GDP. The real question is: why so little?

[Gregor Lehmiller]

Here are some comments from a former private sector meteorologist who now works in finance, and who has used both the "free" information and private forecasting services:

The big issue here that not many are cognizant of is simply that private forecasters cannot replace the role of the NWS. Why?

1) The data that goes into the computer models comes from government sources (satellites, radiosondes, buoys, etc.), data from other governments that are negotiated by treaty (WMO rules), private aircraft company data under non-disclosure agreements, etc. In other words, it is not possible for private forecasters to run the forecast models, as they cannot collect the data needed to drive the models. The government will always have to run the main models and provide the initialization data for other models.

2) Very simply, forecasts carry liability, and the needed dividing line between what consitutes liability and not is murky. How does one define what are weather warning situations, e.g., what may be a life or death situation for one could be viewed as a simple forecast for another?

On another level, this bill is frustrating, as it reduces public access to information and models that are funded by taxpayers. Companies that try to make money by reducing access to information, as opposed to adding value, as essentially trying to gain monopoly rents. This is wrong. Even more infuriating is that ACCU-Weather's main business model is to take the model output statistics (MOS) forecasts from the US government models, take in addition the raw output of both US and some other government models, and add a few adjustments. In effect, they are just repackaging information that is already there.

A business model I can live with is for the private sector to produce better forecasts, and thus make money from providing true value creation (a stellar example of a private sector weather forecasting corporation that does that is WSI). But that would require true value creation as opposed to trying to gain monopoly control over the require information.

[cymack]

>On another level, this bill is frustrating, as it reduces public access to information and models that are funded by taxpayers.

It would be easy for sloppy thinkers to conclude that this was the true main purpose of the bill.

[Dale]

On the plus side- he's about in my price range.

[a different chris]

Ha! Once again American capitalism is triumphant!! D2D calculated a while ago that he'd have to mortgage his house to buy Somebody Important (a minister, or something, whatever the hell those weird English legislators are).

But in the US, we can get a whole Senator for less than a month's white-collar wages!! Probably get a tax deduction to boot!

[George Orwell]

http://www.spreadingsantorum.com

[Scott Howell]

Email to Ricky...
You are the MAN, Ricky! Now you want to give these private weather welfare queens like The Weather Channel (TWC), and Accu-Weather, exclusive access to certain weather data that the taxpayers pay for! That's 'us-folks' for you out-of-touch politicians! You voted to give $5 billion to the commercial airline welfare queens after 9/11, and now you do this!
Here's an idea for a Senate Bill:
Freedom to Forecast Act (patterned after the Freedom to Farm Act from a few years ago).
Turn the NWS/NOAA into an entity that is self-supported by its data and services. Make private individuals and private companies pay for the weather data on a per-user bases. TWC and other private weather companies would be charged on a per-user bases. So if TWC has lets say 50,000,000 subs then they would be charged more than an individual or a smaller private weather company. That way, these private companies would not be subsidized by MY taxes! Sure you could have certain weather data in the public domain, like limited use zone forecasts and severe weather watches/warnings, but access to value-added data, like computer forecasts and NEXRAD Radars would be accessed by the folks who pay. I hate it that I have to support these weather-welfare queens like the ones mentioned above with my income taxes, but what angers me more is that you, Ricky, would have the audacity to restrict taxpayer funded data from the--TAXPAYERS!
Either give the public access to the data that it pays for OR STOP THE SUBSIDY to these queens!

[Paul Sulky]

If weather forecasts are privatized, can I get my money back if the forecast busts. I am a former USAF forecaster and those private weather companies, no matter how good, will not be 100% accurate, just like the present system.