By Josiah Ryan
Every “green job†created with government money in Spain over the last eight years came at the cost of 2.2 regular jobs, and only one in 10 of the newly created green jobs became a permanent job, says a new study released this month. The study draws parallels with the green jobs programs of the Obama administration. Â
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President Obama, in fact, has used Spain’s green initiative as a blueprint for how the United States should use federal funds to stimulate the economy. Obama’s economic stimulus package,which Congress passed in February, allocates billions of dollars to the green jobs industry.
But the author of the study, Dr. Gabriel Calzada, an economics professor at Juan Carlos University in Madrid, said the United States should expect results similar to those in Spain:
“Spain’s experience (cited by President Obama as a model) reveals with high confidence, by two different methods, that the U.S. should expect a loss of at least 2.2 jobs on average, or about 9 jobs lost for every 4 created, to which we have to add those jobs that non-subsidized investments with the same resources would have created,†wrote Calzada in his report: Study of the Effects on Employment of Public Aid to Renewable Energy Sources.
Not surprised in the least. And I don’t think it is entirely unintended either. They don’t care about people, in fact, people are the problem.
Don’t believe me? Then don’t take my word for it, take theirs:
http://www.rightwingnews.com/quotes/wacko.php
Yawn… ooohh I’m soooo scared. Extiction of the species scares me, gee, let me think…. ummm , just a little bit more….!
Not to worry really – the powers that be find ways to kill people anyway:
Austria’s OMV and Hungary’s MOL have teamed up with two companies from the United Arab Emirates to extract the gas from fields in Iraq’s Kurdish region. They anticipate that supplies will be sufficient to feed the long-planned Nabucco pipeline, which proposes pumping gas to Austria via Turkey. The pipeline would reduce Europe’s dependency on gas from Russia….Winning one battle of the war against Russia for control of Europe’s gas supply justifies a million or so human lives lost, doesn’t it?
Let’s start with what we do know, because it’s already happened.
We know cutting taxes on the wealthiest Americans and companies doesn’t work, because it didn’t work. None of the nearly $2 trillion of those tax cuts ever trickled down to the rest of us. And we know it didn’t create millions of jobs – at least not here in America.
We also know that slashing regulations and regulatory oversight of the US financial services companies doesn’t work, because that didn’t work either. Rather than using all that extra cash and regulatory freedom to do the kind of things that create long term growth, they “leveraged it†to create a kind of imaginary parallel universe, populated by imaginary (unregulated) investment instruments, which they flipped between themselves creating imaginary assets, imaginary profits, but strangely no imaginary loses.
Because in their parallel universe they could not lose — as long as everyone else did.
So, that’s what we know. And we know it because we’re living the consequences right now.
That leaves us the Obama way.
I can’t speak for conservatives, but when they charge that Obama’s policies will “ruin the economy and the nation,” I have to assume they mean Obama will ruin them in different ways than their policies have already ruined it.
Well, I don’t know about you but, after what we’ve been through, I’m ready for different.
So, while the dethroned right wails in the desert about how Obama is about to turn America towards European socialism, I say, fine. At least while we dig ourselves out of the tar pit of phony capitalism the right gave us, we’ll be able to go to a doctor when sick and, while we might never be able to retire, we’ll at least have Medicare and Social Security (which, please recall, the right wanted to offer as a sacrifice to the Wall Street volcano gods back in 2001).
Of course they won’t get it. If they could get it, they would have switched off those right wing propagandists years ago. And you can bet your bottom dollar — if you still have one — that when their own house goes into foreclosure or they lose their job, they’ll blame who? Obama and the Democrats, of course.
Because stupid isn’t skin deep. Stupid goes right to bone.
Republicans are counting on it.
With the onset of the collapse of Bushenomics, the smarter heads on Wall Street were well aware that an effective rescue of the economy could not be accomplished by the self-described economic ignoramus, John McCain, and the omni-ignoramus, Sarah Palin. So they put their money on the smart skinny kid with the funny name.
Enter the Obama Administration, facing a national debt of ten trillion dollars (about 80% of the U.S. gross domestic product), a federal budget deficit of one and a half trillion, and a growing roster of homeless, foreclosed, unemployed, uninsured citizens.
Meanwhile, the oligarchs are sitting pretty. Over the past thirty years, as the average income of the bottom half of the population has grown a mere six percent, the income of the top one percent has more than tripled, the greatest income gap since 1928, the year before the onset of the great depression. And the typical CEO of a Fortune 500 company earns in half a day more than the median employee of the corporation earns in a year.
The oligarch’s personal wealth, much of which is deposited in offshore banks or invested in multi-national corporations, is of little use in the oncoming struggle to repair and restore our national economy. The national wealth thrown at the rich by Ronald Reagan and by the Bushes did not, as promised, “trickle down” to the rest of us. Instead, it “leaked out” of the national economy, along with the manufacturing base.
“First and last, it’s a question of money. Those men who own the earth make the laws to protect what they have. They fix up a sort of fence or pen around what they have, and they fix the law so the fellow on the outside cannot get in. The laws are really organized for the protection of the men who rule the world. They were never organized or enforced to do justice. We have no system for doing justice, not the slightest in the world.”
Already you’re hearing voices question whether President Obama’s is pushing too much at once on the `system.’ These voices sound reasonable when they claim we should `fix the economy first’ and worry about health-care, energy and education later. They’re enablers of capitalism’s dark underbelly, hoping to run out the clock on President Obama’s popularity and continue business as usual.
Let’s start with what we know. Let’s deal in the empirical evidence that history provides. The social justice/rich people suck concept that has been embrassed in Europe for decades has worked out great for their economies and unemployment rates.
Our (previous?) model of free market capitalism and individual freedom and responsibility has only,by contrast, resulted in the USA being the largest economy on the planet with the highest standard of living ever known to humanity. The poor in this country have cell phones, cars, and cable TV. I am certain that their position in life is pre-ordained as a result of greed however, and that the choices people make in life have absolutely nothing to do with where they are in the socioeconomic hiearcy. If we could just get rid of the out-dated notion of hard work and determination can pay off and anyone has the potential to become wealthy in the USA, I’m sure we would be in a eutopia where everyone had the same, regardless of luck, work ethic, genes, intelligence, looks, personality, etc. Our only hope to ever be able to mitigate these damn variables mentioned in the previous sentence would be for Government to be control nearly every aspect of our lives. Then just maybe it would be possible.
My questions to Robin N. Hood is have you ever been poor? I would guess you have lived a nice sheltered life. You feel no pain and are younger than you realize.