America Is Being Transformed Into Brazil

Our dishwasher broke just after Christmas. The timer stopped working, and a new one costs about $100. My wife suggested that since the dishwasher is nineteen years old, we should buy a new one. Up until now it was working very quietly and efficiently, washing and drying a full load in about an hour.

We visited the appliance shop where we had recently purchased a new clothes washing machine a few months earlier. I mentioned to the salesman that our new washer was very slow, taking nearly two hours to finish a large load compared to our old one, which took about 35 minutes. With a bright smile, he explained that that was because of the new federal energy efficiency standards for clothes washers enacted by the Obama administration’s Department of Energy in May 2012.

(I later looked this up on the Energy.gov website, and found that this new regulation was only one of over 40 new onerous energy regulations on products and appliances already enacted, with many more to come, including for Christmas lights. According to the website, these are “sensible steps” that will save consumers “billions on energy bills”. This is a highly suspect claim. When energy consumption decreases, utility companies typically raise the price per kilowatt hour to make up for the loss in revenue.)

And by the way, our salesman interjected, this standard also applies to new dishwashers. They now take as long as three hours to complete the wash and dry cycle. Oh, about your nineteen-year-old dishwasher…don’t expect the new one to last that long. No matter which one you buy, from $250 to $1000, the average expected life of the new washers is five to seven years.

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