For example, the “stimulus” package would provide $28 billion in subsidies for renewable energy. Over the past three decades, Washington has spent more than $115 billion on renewables—more than the Apollo program and the Manhattan Project together, according to Jim Tankersley of the L.A. Times—yet has precious little to show for it. In 2007, in spite of record-high gas prices and government-mandated use of the controversial corn-based ethanol, renewable energy was still just a drop of all energy consumed—less than 7 percent.

The stimulus plan favors wind and solar energy, providing billions of dollars in loans, tax credits, and R&D. Yet wind and solar, whose costs are astronomical compared to coal-based power, are still far from economically viable. Together, they provide less than half a percent of total energy consumed.

Some argue this is just the funding package we need to make wind and solar viable. But even the President’s Secretary of Energy Steven Chu appears overwhelmed at the task at hand: “We essentially need a second Industrial Revolution… we have to start inventing right, left and center.” But at what cost to American consumers? As L.A. Times’ Jim Tankersley says, “If [Obama] fails, he could cripple existing industries and squeeze cash-strapped Americans with higher energy prices.”

Another goal under the guise of economic “stimulus” is to spend $32 billion to overhaul the electric grid from a regional power system to a nationwide network, transporting renewable energy over 3,000 miles of new transmission lines to connect rural to urban areas. Not only are the shovels not ready; designs for the national grid do not even exist. According to Michael Moynihan, director of the Green Project with the Washington, D.C. think-tank, NDN, “Before you spend billions of dollars on new lines, you have to spend millions of dollars on design work…The planning just has not been done.”

In addition, the new grid could require federal legislation to address interstate issues, as well as permits and rights-of-way from states, localities, and citizens—reluctant to have massive transmission towers constructed in their jurisdictions and backyards.

A recent report by the Tennessee Valley Authority and other organizations that oversee power reliability, put the cost of the new power grid at close to a trillion dollars over the next 15 years, including constructing the transmission system and the wind turbines needed to produce the power.

Mr. Obama’s own budget director Peter Orszag said it most succinctly last year as head of CBO when he warned Congress that “some of the candidates for public works, such as grant-funded initiatives to develop alternative energy sources, are totally impractical for countercyclical policy, regardless of whatever other merits they may have. In general, many if not most of these projects could end up making the economic situation worse...”

President Obama has asked Republicans to stop playing politics. Rather it is President Obama himself who has played politics with the American people by selling his far-reaching, long-term agendas as a stimulus and burdening Americans with exorbitant energy costs for generations to come.