Government Spending Vs Jobs
From left-wing Politico, an evaluation of Barack Obama’s green jobs stimulus spending.
Excerpt:
President Barack Obama heads to an energy plant in North Carolina on Monday to talk once again about the job-creating power of a green economy.
The catch? Nearly three years into Obama’s presidency, the White House can’t point to much solid evidence that significant numbers of Americans are scoring the green jobs the president has been touting.
Monthly Labor Department employment reports say nothing about the new clean energy workforce, while an effort to document how many Americans actually make a living in the “green collar” field may not be done by November 2012.
Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers suggests 225,000 clean energy jobs were either created or preserved through the third quarter of 2010 thanks to more than $80 billion in the economic stimulus package. But those are estimates at best.
White House officials say asking about the connection between the 9.1 percent unemployment rate and the administration’s concerted green jobs campaign is the wrong question.
And we should not have tried this, because Spain tried spending money on green jobs and it raised unemployment.
Excerpt:
Pajamas Media has received a leaked internal assessment produced by Spain’s Zapatero administration. The assessment confirms the key charges previously made by non-governmental Spanish experts in a damning report exposing the catastrophic economic failure of Spain’s “green economy” initiatives.
[...]Unsurprisingly for a governmental take on a flagship program, the report takes pains to minimize the extent of the economic harm. Yet despite the soft-pedaling, the document reveals exactly why electricity rates “necessarily skyrocketed” in Spain, as did the public debt needed to underwrite the disaster. This internal assessment preceded the Zapatero administration’s recent acknowledgement that the “green economy” stunt must be abandoned, lest the experiment risk Spain becoming Greece.
The government report does not expressly confirm the highest-profile finding of the non-governmental report: that Spain’s “green economy” program cost the country 2.2 jobs for every job “created” by the state. However, the figures published in the government document indicate they arrived at a job-loss number even worse than the 2.2 figure from the independent study.
Green jobs programs don’t work. They haven’t worked anywhere.
Does Obama look around the world and evaluate what policies work and what policies don’t work? Or does he just decide how to spend private sector money based on what makes him feel good, and what makes him look good? Is that what being President is about? Wasting tons of taxpayer money and bankrupting the country so that you can feel good about yourself because people think you are doing something good?
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