One glorious day all of us will awaken in our mixed-use neighborhoods, rustle up a nutritious garden-grown breakfast and pedal our bikes to a “green collar” jobs using a path generously provided by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
As of this moment, however, the “green energy economy” is incapable of spurring the taillights on a motor-scooter (much less an economic recovery) without a backup gas-powered generator and government subsidy.
Why then, just as we learned that 85,0000 Americans had “unexpectedly” — as news stories put it — lost their jobs last month, did the Obama Administration pin recovery hopes on a colossally misguided social engineering project?
We’re not talking about last year’s colossally misguided stimulus plan which “created” and/or “saved” an incalculable number of non-existent jobs in various imaginary zip codes. Though we do continue to learn more about that slapdash experiment.
At the time of the stimulus debate, President Barack Obama asserted that the “urgent need to accelerate job growth” would be tied to spending on (ethically approved) transportation projects. Yet, an Associated Press reported this week that unemployment rates rose and fell regardless of how much money Washington doled out — the report was reviewed by independent economists at five universities.
No, this time the administration will renew its focus on stimulus through a new “green jobs” boondoggle. President Obama announced this week that Washington will offer $2.3 billion in tax credits for “clean energy” jobs. Using his very own pie-in the-sky calculations it puts the cost of every job at a tax-financed $135,000.
The uncalculated part of the above equation is this: bogus jobs kill real jobs. The King Juan Carlos University in Madrid, for instance, a study found that in Spain — the very country Obama has held out as the exemplar of greening (and with only a 19 + percent unemployment rate!) — every green job created had destroyed 2.2 jobs in other sectors of the economy.
The administration plans on spreading an additional $100 million of wealth on green job training and another $500 million on energy efficiency and renewable energy companies – on top of the billions already subsidizing these sectors on the state and federal level. It is a deeply unserious way to pretend to assist American recovery.
Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, who announcing the green effort on the Huffington Post, for instance, claims that green jobs will increase American competitiveness by preparing workers for “a range of careers” including, “weatherization specialists, wind and energy auditors, and solar panel installers.”
Yep, that should do it.
One can forgive Solis for her absurdity, I suppose, as she has, from what I can tell, never held a paying position that wasn’t footed by taxpayers. A trend in this administration.
Now, despite this effort to mold the economy to ideological tastes by predetermining which industry should succeed and fail, real jobs will one day return — and it will have nothing with any high-minded legislation that layers on more centralized economic control.
In the meantime, utilizing unemployment fears, this administration continues to pursue social policy through faux stimulus plans, funneling money into acceptable sectors, no matter how inefficient, no matter how unviable, no matter how unsustainable.
What we’ve learned is that the Obama administration will do anything humanly possible to rescue the economy so long as it doesn’t relieve the pressure on the private sector. After all, this president explained last year that he believes “only government” can get us out of our troubles.
And that’s our biggest problem now.
E-mail David Harsanyi at dharsanyi@denverpost.com.
