Fool Me Twice (13 page)

While the Center for American Progress's plan suggests many possibilities, it provides little by way of concrete numbers, and nothing that comes even close to the creation of the millions of jobs that are needed.

Shortly after the Obama inauguration, in early February 2009, Progressive Caucus Democrats in Congress teamed up with Big Labor and Big Green to push for a “Green American Dream.”
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Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) and Rep. Jay Inslee (D-WA) held a press conference with Laborers' International Union general president Terence O'Sullivan, Sierra Club political director Cathy Duvall, and other “clean energy” business leaders to “urge Congressional leaders to take bold action to create a new Green American Dream for working people by making sure the newly created green jobs are good jobs that can sustain families and fuel economic recovery.”
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(Inslee has since resigned from Congress to run for governor of Washington State. He was one of nearly two dozen House Democrats in 2012 not seeking reelection.
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)

As a result of Progressive-Big Labor–Big Green pressure, the $787 billion “stimulus” bill of 2009 was the first piece of legislation to include “green job creation” projects. Three of these programs were set to expire at the end of 2011. They were supposed to have created over 100,000 jobs: 55,000 in conjunction with projects for wind; 45,000 jobs for solar; and 11,200 jobs for geothermal.
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Using “stimulus” funds, for example, sixty-two grant awards of between $42,000 and $100,000 were made by the Department of Labor's Employment and Training Administration to “fund both green job training and evaluation projects” and to “teach workers the skills required in emerging industries including energy efficiency and renewable energy.”
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But in November 2011, a U.S. Department of Labor audit asked where the money gone. The audit revealed that the program had an “underwhelming success rate.” About $500 million in “stimulus” funds were allocated nationwide to train nearly 125,000 people for “green careers.” The audit found only about 53,000 people had been trained, of which only a little over 8,000 actually found jobs.
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Half a billion dollars spent to train 8,000 employees!

The BlueGreen Alliance, or BGA, put forth its own nationwide blueprint,
Jobs21! Good Jobs for the 21st Century
, to solve the jobs crisis in August 2011.
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BGA is one of the main progressive political alliances between Big Labor and Big Green—and a partner in Al Gore's Alliance for Climate Protection. BGA was created in 2006 by the Sierra Club and the United Steel Workers union and now includes a long list of unions like the AFL-CIO and SEIU.
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It also now incorporates the radical Apollo Alliance Project, which claimed credit in February 2009 for “influencing” the content of many provisions in the $787 billion “stimulus” bill.
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Sometime in 2011 BGA absorbed the Apollo Alliance, which itself had been spun off from its founding organizations, Campaign for America's Future and COWS (Center for Wisconsin Strategy), in late 2007.

BGA's plan identifies federal tax incentives and loan guarantees, purportedly to “provide the clean energy sector with the tools it needs to produce energy, to make the parts for wind turbines, solar panels and other equipment, and to connect to new supply chains and markets while spurring private investment and job creation.” But at the top of BGA's list is the creation of a “Green Bank,” to provide both seed money and a consistent funding source for renewable energy companies. BGA claims this would “encourage private investment to support loans for an array of advanced clean energy technologies.”

The Center for American Progress had also proposed a public Green Bank in May 2009. CAP's John Podesta and Karen Kornbluh saw the creation of a Green Bank as critical to the progressive Big Green agenda.
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Such a bank, they wrote, “could lead to the steady and reliable creation of clean-energy jobs and would be a crucial element of the transition to a clean-energy economy.” The Green Bank would magically open credit markets and “motivate businesses to invest again” and would enable clean-energy technologies (wind, solar, geothermal, advanced biomass, and energy efficiency) to be “deployed on a large scale and become commercially viable at current electricity costs.” It would allow the U.S. to “lead the world in the transformation to a global economy powered by low-carbon energy,” Podesta and Kornbluh claimed.

As a jobs creator, this plan is more pie in the sky. Moreover, in our chapter on “green energy,” we show in detail how the Obama administration's green loan guarantees have, to date, been a supersized bust for taxpayers,
while those receiving billions of dollars in federal backing have literally made off like bandits.

The BlueGreen Alliance, in addition to a Green Bank, also wants a Green Manufacturing revolving loan fund. BGA claims this would create 680,000 manufacturing jobs and 1,972,000 additional jobs over five years.
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BGA also wants a new regulation—the National Renewable Electricity Standard—which would mandate production of 25 percent of the country's electricity from renewable energy sources by 2025. BGA projects the creation of 850,000 jobs in existing manufacturing firms and even designates eight of the largest American states with the “greatest potential”: California, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

The chairman of the U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), introduced the Clean Energy Standard Act on March 2, 2012. Bingaman's bill would inaugurate a Clean Energy Standard, or CES, beginning in 2015.
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Utilities “would need to sell a percentage of their electricity from clean energy sources, and each year would need to sell a slightly greater amount of clean energy.”
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Bingaman and Sen. Sam Brownback (R-KS) had introduced the same bill two years earlier. But Michael Williams, the legislative representative for the BGA, had complained in September 2010 that the previous bill “does not meet the targets laid out in our report [
Building a Clean Energy Assembly Line
], but understanding the difficulty of passing nearly anything this year, Bingaman-Brownback may just thread the needle as evidenced by the bill's diverse and large number of cosponsors.”
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In reality, this is a backdoor plan to introduce cap and trade legislation. The tipoff is: “All generators of clean energy would be given credits based upon their carbon emissions.”
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The BGA's Williams added that there were “other pieces of legislation that can move with the CES. Home Star and Building Star are residential and commercial energy efficiency measures with strong bipartisan support.” The BGA proposal for residential energy efficiency includes a Weatherization Assistance Program (WAP), Home Star, and Rural Star. Home Star alone was predicted to generate 168,000 jobs based on a proposed $6 billion two-year rebate program.
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The Center for American Progress was yet more rapturous. It claimed passage of Home Star, Building Star, and Rural Star legislation would create 250,000 new jobs a year.
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BGA calls for yet another federal mandate: the National Energy Efficiency Resource Standard. NEERS would “encourage more efficient generation, transmission, and use of electricity and natural gas,”
et voila
, would create 220,000 jobs over ten years. CAP's plan imagines that just generating 20 percent of power using wind would create more than 500,000 jobs. But CAP does not provide a time frame.
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Many more blueprints for “green jobs” have appeared since 2009. Most of them differ only in their imagination of the number of jobs they will create. In an Obama second term, you can be sure you would see and hear about various schemes tucked into another bill that could never pass Congress on their own. That is how we got all the lovely hidden aspects of ObamaCare.

T
HE NATION IS
facing a jobs crisis unlike any in our history. This crisis goes far beyond any temporary fluctuations in official unemployment statistics.

It begins with millions of American youth who are not even included in the standard employment indices. Some 6.7 million are “neither enrolled in school nor participating in the labor market.” They are not “investing in their human capital or earning income,” according to a January 2012 report of the White House Council for Community Solutions and the Corporation for National and Community Service.
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The bad news was only partially revealed in the report's conclusion: in the 16–24 age group, at least 6.7 million (17 percent) are currently “opportunity youth.” Actually, the White House–generated crisis scenario is short of the mark. Bureau of Labor Statistics data for February 2012 showed teenage unemployment (partially a lower age bracket) at 24 percent, higher than the White House estimate by more than one-third.
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Many of the “opportunity youth,” according to the administration's report, have dropped out of high school or college and been unable to find work. Others have become involved in the criminal justice system. Some have mental or other health conditions. Others have care-giving responsibilities to their families. The White House report estimated a
“chronic opportunity youth” population of approximately 3.4 million, as well as an “under-attached opportunity youth population” of about 3.3 million.

In its own January 2012 report, the leading “progressive” think tank, the Center for American Progress, predicted that full-time national service programs could produce jobs for 60,000 youth.
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But given an “opportunity youth” population of 6.7 million, 60,000 jobs—even if taxpayers could afford to create them out of thin air—would hardly make a dent.

One “progressive” economist, Heidi Shierlolz at the Economic Policy Institute, stated in September 2010 that in order to get “the national unemployment rate back to 5 percent, where it was before the 2008 downturn, the economy would be required to generate about 17 million jobs—or about 285,000 a month for five straight years.”
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A partnership of three progressive think tanks—the Economic Policy Institute, Demos, and the Century Foundation—working together under the rubric of Our Fiscal Security, produced a budget blueprint in November 2011 for “economic recovery and fiscal responsibility”:

Jobs and economic growth are essential to our capacity to reduce deficits.

[ … ]

There should be no across-the-board spending reductions until the economy fully recovers. We believe there should be no consideration of overall spending reductions until unemployment has fallen to 6% and remained at or below that level for six months.
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But if six months of continuous 6 percent unemployment—let alone the pre-downturn rate of 5 percent—is the goal, then that goal would never be reached and the spending would never end.

Barack Obama claimed in his 2012 State of the Union address that jobs creation would be the driving force behind his second term. “Join me,” Obama said, “in a national commitment to train two million Americans
with skills that will lead directly to a job.”
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In response, a warning was issued by David B. Muhlhausen, of the Heritage Foundation:

Before Congress signs off on any new initiatives, we must recognize that President Obama wants to add several new programs on top of the 47 job-training programs already operated by the federal government. Further complicating the matter, the U.S. Government Accountability Office has concluded that there is little evidence that these programs are effective.
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Muhlhausen, who has been expounding on the Job Corps scheme for at least five years, directs our attention to the abject failure of the federal government's “flagship program for hard-to-employ youth.” Participants in the Job Corps, he wrote, earned fewer high school diplomas than non-participants; were no more likely to attend or complete college; earned only $22 more per week than a control group; and only earned $0.22 more in hourly wages than the control group.
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But the failure of federal jobs training is an old story. More than twenty-five years ago (in 1986) James Bovard—dubbed by the
Wall Street Journal
as the “roving inspector general of the modern State”
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—penned an article about it for the Cato Institute.
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Bovard's opening salvo looked back a further twenty-five years to the 1960s, to John F. Kennedy's “New Frontier” and Lyndon Johnson's “War on Poverty” programs. The results of these programs were brutal:

Federal job-training programs have harmed the careers of millions of Americans, failed to impart valuable job skills to the poor, and squandered billions of dollars annually. For 25 years, government programs have warped work ethics, helped disillusion generations of disadvantaged youth, and deluged America with fraudulent statistics. After spending over a hundred billion dollars on manpower programs we have learned little or nothing: today's programs merely repeat the mistakes of the early 1960s. Federal programs have reduced the incomes of millions of trainees and have helped create a growing underclass of permanently unemployed Americans.

“Even worse, government-funded jobs training diminishes the available job pool for the private sector and damages the economy,” Bovard wrote.