As the stock market sinks today in the face of news that no jobs were created in America last month (even as the number of people in need of jobs rose), the Obama administration is preparing to spend billions more on green-jobs fantasies and boondoggles as the latest snake-oil “cure” for the bad economy. At Forbes.com, Merrill Matthews chronicles some of the past green-jobs failures that cost taxpayers billions while creating no lasting jobs and leaving creditors on the hook for unpaid loans:
even as the president claims he is now laser-focused on job creation, he wants the public to forget all of his previous taxpayer-funded efforts to create those “green jobs” of the future, many of which have been abject failures. Like the $20 million federal grant given to Seattle to weatherize houses. The promise? To create “2,000 living-wage jobs in Seattle and retrofitting 2,000 homes in poorer neighborhoods,” according to the SeattlePI. The reality a year later, “only three homes had been retrofitted and just 14 new jobs have emerged from the program.”
The much-hyped company Solyndra, which manufactures—um, make that “manufactured”—solar technology, has closed its doors and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Only a year ago Obama gave it $535 million in low-cost loan guarantees, touting the company “as a prime example of how green technology could deliver jobs,” according to an NBC-affiliate report. Now another 1,000 people have become unemployed victims of Obama’s job-creating skills. And taxpayers have become victims of another half-billion dollars sucked down the Obama job-creating drain. . .
Perhaps the best example of the president’s job-creation failures is his “green car” efforts. Talk about driving the economy into the ground! The president has set a goal of 1 million plug-in cars by 2015. And so he started doling out taxpayer money, announcing a $2.4 billion program in March 2009. Since the government was a majority stakeholder in GM at the time, the Chevy Volt became a model to be emulated. Except … well, nobody wants it. GM only sold 125 Volts in July—and that’s with the government buying some of them. At that blistering sales pace we could hit, oh, maybe 4,000 on the road by 2015.
Remember New London, Connecticut, the dying industrial town that threw property rights under the bus thanks to 2005′s notoriously awful Kelo decision? I’m sure your blood pressure can answer that question. So, after the city was victorious in its case against homeowners, its planned redevelopment plans fell through after Pfizer closed its adjacent research facility. The cleared field that was once occupied by historic single-family homes became a home only for waist-high weeds and feral cats, as I noted on the five-year anniversary of the decision last year.
CEI Weekly is a compilation of articles and blog posts from CEI’s fellows and associates sent out via e-mail every Friday. Also included in the weekly newsletter is a brief description of CEI’s weekly podcast and a feature on a major CEI breakthrough made during the week. To sign up for CEI Weekly, go to http://cei.org/newsletters. CEI Weekly September 2, 2011 >>Featured Story
State governments across the country are struggling to balance their budgets; meanwhile, union lobbyists are pushing for better benefits and more handouts. To educate taxpayers about their state governments’ priorities, CEI has partnered with Crossroads GPS in a new initiative: the Big Labor vs. Taxpayers Index. States are ranked in 23 different categories and given scores that reflect Big Labor’s influence on state legislators and regulators. Labor Policy Analysts Vincent Vernuccio and Trey Kovacs blogged on the index at BigGovernment. To take a closer look at the state rankings, you can visit WorkplaceChoice.org.
Most education spending does not qualify as a “stimulus,” since it has no short-term economic payoff, and thus can’t jump-start the economy. During the Great Depression, President Roosevelt, a pioneer of “stimulus” spending, actually cut federal education spending, as historian Gordon Lloyd has noted. (See Gordon Lloyd, The Two Faces of Liberalism: How the Hoover-Roosevelt Debate Shapes the 21st Century (2006).) While Roosevelt spent lots of money on other things, and spent more than any other President before him, even the big-spending Roosevelt realized that education spending does nothing to end recessions, and does not jump-start the economy, even if it might be helpful to the economy in the long-run. The Obama administration does not have a clue about how to revive the economy. It claimed that Obama’s $800 billion stimulus package would deliver a short-run “jolt” that would quickly lift the economy, but unemployment rose very rapidly after its passage, and it destroyed thousands of jobs in America’s export sector and elsewhere while outsourcing thousands of energy jobs to foreign countries like China.
I heard the news while driving home from work: a California porn star tested positive for HIV, resulting in a voluntary industry-wide shutdown. Here we go again, I thought as I waited for the radio announces to cry out for mandatory condom usage in adult films. It’s an issue that surfaces every other year or so after a news story about an HIV scare in the industry and a topic I have written about in the past, trying to explain why allowing government to get involved in individual’s choices about sex (albeit, sex work) is a very bad idea. To my surprise, the radio announcer made a comment that I think is the right aspect of this story to focus on.
“I’m surprised we don’t hear about porn actors testing positive for HIV more often,” the radio DJ said.
He assumes, like many, that because of the frequency with which adult entertainers engage in sex acts and the variety of partners they generally enjoy that the rates of infection would be higher among porn actors than among the general population. After all, we aren’t surprised when a firefighter gets burned or a shop teacher loses a finger; it sort of goes with the territory. However, upon investigating the numbers it seems that this assumption is incorrect and perhaps media attention on the few cases of infection that occur among porn actors every few years has skewed our perspectives on the risks. A porn star contracting HIV is perhaps a little something like a plane crash; the fatality rate of fliers is quite low compared with number of drivers who perish on our nation’s highways every year, yet the media attention associated with each and every plane crash contributes to many people’s feeling that flying is far riskier than driving.
The scandal over Operation Fast and Furious, in which the Obama administration funneled thousands of guns to violent Mexican drug lords in an abortive, mismanaged sting operation that backfired and led to the killings of many Mexicans and a couple U.S. government employees, has finally resulted in a few resignations by federal officials involved in the operation (including an Obama-appointed U.S. attorney in Arizona, and the acting head of the ATF). But Justice Department higher-ups have so far avoided any accountability.
As lawyer David Rittgers notes, the operation wasn’t simply a blunder, but also a violation of multiple federal laws that the Obama administration simply ignored:
ATF supervisors ordered agents to facilitate firearm sales to known or suspected “straw buyers” that intended to move the guns across the border and give them to drug cartels. Gun dealers in the U.S. reported the suspicious transactions to the ATF, expecting to cooperate in apprehending the gunrunners. As it turns out, the suspect buyers had disqualifying conditions that should have shown up in federally mandated instant background checks…but didn’t. The firearms trafficked across the border predictably showed up at crime scenes, including those involved with the murder of a Border Patrol agent, an ICE agent, a Mexican military helicopter shoot-down, and other murders on both sides of the border.
If you’re a private citizen, this sort of thing gets you 30 years in prison. If you’re a whistleblower within ATF, you get terminated. If you’re a supervisor responsible for such a scheme, you get promotedreassigned to ATF headquarters.
The Department of Justice sued this week to stop the proposed AT&T-T-Mobile merger. Associate Director of Technology Studies Ryan Radia thinks this is a mistake. The evidence that the merger would make the wireless market less competitive is unconvincing. Nobody knows if the merger will succeed or not. Either way, consumer harm is unlikely.
The Washington Times yesterday had an editorial, “Paying Your Neighbor’s Mortgage,” about the costly new bailout advocated by political appointees in the Obama administration, a bailout unauthorized by federal law that could cost taxpayers “tens of billions of dollars a year,” while providing preferential treatment for borrowers whose loans are owned by the government-sponsored mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac:
The Obama administration wants to let millions of homeowners with government-backed mortgages refinance their loans at current low rates, which are about 4 percent. A very large percentage of those loans are underwater, and the homeowners couldn’t get lower rates without government intervention. The White House is acting as if forced refinancing is a free lunch. It’s not. Reducing the interest rate that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac get paid on these loans will cost the government-sponsored enterprises tens of billions of dollars a year.
The reality is that Fannie and Freddie are effectively part of the government, and they hold $730 billion and $680 billion worth of mortgage securities respectively. The Federal Reserve System has $900 billion worth of securities insured by Fannie and Freddie. The Treasury held about $80 billion of those securities in July. What all this means is that taxpayers are investors in mortgage-backed securities whether they want to be or not. Don’t believe the Obama administration’s populist rhetoric that it wants to reduce the costs of borrowing for homeowners at the expense of big investors in mortgage-backed securities. In this case, what Democrats really are trying to do is redistribute wealth from all taxpayers to underwater homeowners, not from fat cats to the starving homeless.
This is a Hail Mary pass that won’t work. There is little evidence that lowering payments reduces the risk of default and foreclosure. If that were indeed the case, private lenders would have an incentive to modify mortgages, which they aren’t doing on a massive scale. It’s also not clear why irresponsible people who bought larger houses than they could afford should be rewarded with cheaper mortgages than the market is willing to provide. Once again, the thrifty will be asked to bail out the profligate. The moral hazard and perverse incentives created by such a system are symbolic of an Obama economy that inhibits smart investment and growth.
ENERGY – In 10 Years, [Pennsylvania] Will Produce 25% of America’s Natural Gas “According to a study commissioned by the Marcellus Shale Commission (MSC), by 2020, the Marcellus alone could produce 17.5 Bcf/d. That would be 25 percent of all the natural gas produced in the country. What’s more, it could support 256,420 jobs and pump an additional $20 billion into the Pennsylvania economy.”
PHYSICIANS’ RIGHTS – Judge Blocks Parts of Texas Abortion Law on Sonograms “A federal judge temporarily blocked key provisions of a Texas abortion law on Tuesday that would require women seeking the procedure to view a sonogram and listen to the heartbeat of their fetus. [...] ‘The act compels physicians to advance an ideological agenda with which they may not agree, regardless of any medical necessity, and irrespective of whether the pregnant women wish to listen,’ U.S. District Judge Sam Sparks said in the ruling.”
OVERCRIMINALIZATION – Man Faces 75 Years for Recording Police “42-year-old Michael Allison of Illinois could spend the rest of his life in prison for recording police in public. He faces five counts of eavesdropping, a class one felony. Of course, the police are allowed to video people in public with impunity. The Illinois Assistant Attorney General has joined the case and told the judge that citizens do not have the constitutional right to record police.”
In April of this year, my colleague Ryan Radia and I wrote about a proposal making its way through the Texas State House to increase taxes on satellite television subscribers within the state. The article, originally published in the Austin-American Statesman, can be read here:
Spearheading this push to nearly double the tax on satellite television is state Rep. Craig Eiland, D-Galveston. Supporters of the tax argue that it would “level the playing field” between cable and satellite subscribers, complaining that Texans who get cable television pay a roughly 5 percent municipal franchise fee on top of ordinary sales taxes — a fee that doesn’t apply to satellite television.
To be sure, lawmakers should worry about discriminatory, unfair taxes, but municipal franchise fees are different. Assessing fees on private companies that use public resources is just common sense. Cable television lines typically run underneath city streets and other public lands that must be dug up from time to time for repairs or upgrades. This process can be inconvenient and costly. Why shouldn’t cable companies and their subscribers reimburse towns for the reasonable costs they incur?
Satellite providers, by contrast, don’t rely on public resources. Instead, they invest billions of dollars to launch their own satellites into space. DirecTV, for instance, has a fleet of a dozen satellites that orbit Earth, beaming video signals to the small dishes that are so frequently seen on residential rooftops and balconies. Upgrades to this system typically involve nothing more than swapping out a set-top box or adding a new dish — there is no tearing up city streets or public lands.
It’s a basic economic principle that when a service becomes more expensive, people will tend to consume of less of it. Under Eiland’s proposed tax hike, many Texans will likely downgrade their satellite service, or cancel it and switch to cheaper alternatives. This would distort the market for video services, putting cable and satellite installers out of business and limiting choices for Texas consumers.
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