'Green Jobs'

Rick Moran

Dr. Milton R. Wolf has a great piece in theWashington Times about the failure of Obama's green policies to create jobs.

The president recently toured Johnson Controls Inc., a Michigan company that received $300 million from "Obama's stash" to create - drumroll, please - a whopping 150 jobs. Do the math: That's $2 million per green job. And this is the company the WhiteHouse chooses to showcase? Evergreen Solar, a Massachusetts company, also received stimulus money, but the White House that is "the most open and transparent in history" won't say how much, only that Evergreen is "hoping to hire 90 to 100 people." Instead, it declared bankruptcy and shipped 800 jobs overseas. Well, so much for green jobs.

Should we be surprised? During the campaign, Mr. Obama held up Spain's green initiatives as a blueprint for America. We now know that the Spaniards lost 2.2 actual jobs for each "green job" they created. Some blueprint.

Consider ethanol. The government takes billions of dollars from people with actual jobs to prop up the ethanol industry. The trifecta of ethanol's corporate welfare includes a 45-cents- to 55-cents-per-gallon subsidy, a mandate that forces supposedly free Americans to buy the industry's product and an anti-competitive tariff on ethanol imports to prevent consumers from purchasing it at a lower price.

The unintended but easily predictable consequence of burning our food supply in our gas tanks is that grocery prices have skyrocketed. When the limited supply of farmland is diverted to ethanol, the demand for the remaining land goes up, so all food prices are affected. Simple economics. Food shortages are being felt around the world. When Mexico runs short on corn tortillas, you know there's a problem.

The president wanted to create 5 million green jobs by 2018. Not only is he going to come up short, it is likely that the billions we will be spending - if he gets his way -won't buy us energy security, or even cheaper energy in the long run.