The Question that Didn't Get Asked

From The Heritage Foundation today:

 

While pressing Obama on a variety of national security questions, the White House press corps failed to ask: "Mr. President, if your administration is already claiming credit for jobs created in this economy, when can the American people start holding you accountable for all the jobs lost?"

 

Obama's desire to escape all accountability for his economic policies was also on display earlier in the day when he told a town hall in Missouri: "We inherited a $1.3 trillion deficit. That wasn't me." Oh really? The Associated Press fact checked Obama's claim and reports:

Congress controls the purse strings, not the president, and it was under Democratic control for Obama's last two years as Illinois senator. Obama supported the emergency bailout package in President George W. Bush's final months - a package Democratic leaders wanted to make bigger.
...

  He's persuaded Congress to expand children's health insurance, education spending, health information technology and more. He's moving ahead on a variety of big-ticket items on health care, the environment, energy and transportation that, if achieved, will be more enduring than bank bailouts and aid for homeowners.

  The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimated his policy proposals would add a net $428 billion to the deficit over four years, even accounting for his spending reduction goals. Now, the deficit is nearly quadrupling to $1.75 trillion.

 

The cost of Obama's massive spending explosion is about to hit home. The Treasury Department announced yesterday that it is going to step up the issuing of 30-year bonds to cover the hundreds of billions of dollars the Obama administration is spending on bailouts and stimulus. A special advisory committee to the Treasury then warned, "Treasuries will probably not receive the same favorable demand treatment from either source over the coming quarters." Translation: foreign and domestic investors are going to demand significantly higher interest rates in exchange for buying the avalanche of new bonds.

 

Higher interest rates will strangle our economic recovery. Congress and the President should do the opposite of what they apparently intend: They should cut taxes on productive activities, not increase them. They should cut spending, not increase it. And rather than increase government spending with new entitlements like a government-run health plan, they should reduce future entitlement benefits to give credit markets some confidence that U.S. policymakers have not entirely abandoned fiscal discipline.

"What Were You Thinking?"

A Jobs-Killing Bill

From the Heritage Foundation this morning:

 

    Testifying on Capitol Hill yesterday, Energy Secretary Steven Chu, Transportation Secretary Roy LaHood, and EPA administrator Lisa Jackson all pitched the latest cap and trade bill in the House as a "jobs bill." Jackson told the House Energy and Commerce Committee, "This is a jobs bill, and it is a jobs bill that focuses our country's energy on the growth industry of the future." But when Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) asked Jackson how her agency was able to release a cost estimate of the bill after she admitted she had not even read it, Jackson replied: "We had to make assumptions." You know what happens when you make assumptions, don't you?

    The "preliminary analysis" released by Jackson's EPA found that cap and trade would cost the average American household an extra $98 to $140 a year. These numbers are far below most academic studies of cap and trade legislation. For example, a study done by MIT Professor John Reilly found that a scheme modeled after the far more lenient Warner-Lieberman cap and trade bill would cost the average American household a combined $3,900 every year in higher energy costs and taxes. Our own Center for Data Analysis shows Lieberman-Warner would have cost the U.S. economy $4.8 trillion by 2030.

    And then there are the Americans that will lose their jobs completely due to cap and trade. Affirming his belief that carbon taxes would create jobs, Secretary LaHood emphasized "especially green jobs." And what exactly are green jobs? No one knows.

    An academic study of eco-leftist rhetoric released earlier this year shows that there is no standard definition of what a green job is, and most studies that purport to show green job creation ignore the other jobs that are destroyed by energy taxes. When "green jobs" are well defined, studies show that alternative energy policies kill more jobs than they create. President Barack Obama loves to cite Spain as an example of his preferred green job future but a study released last month by researchers at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos shows that for each job created in Spain's renewable energy industry, 2.2 jobs were destroyed elsewhere in the economy.

    We live in a fiercely competitive global marketplace. If carbon taxes were a sound way of creating jobs and economic growth our global competitors would be jumping at the chance to adopt them. Instead we see the opposite: China has said they will never sacrifice their economic growth to reduce carbon emissions and India has called the trade off between carbon caps and economic growth "morally wrong." The smarter way to insure against the possible risks of global warming is to enact policies that will ensure robust economic growth. History shows that richer is greener.

Do you suppose those assumptions made by Jackson's underlings at the EPA are listed in the report?  I bet not, at least for public consumption.

 

Read more about the Myth of "Green Jobs" at the Heritage Foundation web site.  And be sure to read the comments, because many of them are as informative as the article itself  FWIW, I have a neighbor who works in the "Wind Energy Industry."  He tells me that all the parts of these giant windmills are built in SouthEast Asia...

 

"What Were You Thinking?"