The American Spectator

Drudge among others today are headlining the continuing reality that, when jobs are created under Obamanomics, they generally turn out to be temporary make-work jobs.

But it’s worse than is beind discussed today. This Big Government item, “Census Workers Blow Whistle on Hiring Fraud”, actually reminds us of one of the Obama administration’s related scams, the “green jobs” industry. That is something that sounds a little weedy but is really quite simple, a failure to homogenize the data. This practice is employed in order to make soaring claims of jobs “created” from taking taxpayer money and mandating something politically desired. The truth is that the jobs (briefly) created are a fraction of the number claimed.

Consider what we have uncovered in the latter, which I detail in Power Grab: How Obama’s Green Policies Will Steal Your Freedom and Bankrupt America in a discussion that reminds us as well how “green jobs” even more closely resemble census (and of course “stimulus”) jobs in that they are temporary jobs, “bubble” jobs existing only so long as the government (taxpayer) transfer of wealth continues:

“But the most glaring similarity [between ‘green jobs’ and ‘stimulus jobs’], and indeed feature of ‘green jobs’ is that they are temporary. Before you find comfort in this, recall that the unions don’t stand for such notions, and the enactment of green jobs schemes ensures further infusions of taxpayer money into the bubble to make the make-work permanent.

We saw how some jobs supposedly created under the ‘stimulus’ actually reflected funding of a position that lasted, in some cases, only a week. The reason you hear of enormous numbers of projected jobs is because those pushing them do not ‘homogenize the data.’ Homogenizing, or harmonizing, the claimed green jobs figures annualizes them, translating the thousands of days-, weeks- or months-long gigs (i.e., ‘jobs created’) into the equivalent of fulltime jobs. So a sexy claim of half a million jobs, which are sixty-day installation contracts, is homogenized at around 75,000 ‘jobs created.’

But make-work and mandating that federal buildings get new caulk is not creating positive  economic activity, or growth, as few if any of those jobs will exist in a year without a doubling down on the subsidy just to keep the wards of the state going. Regardless of its intellectual integrity, this is a favorite game of the statist set hell-bent on pretending the state is the source of wealth creation and good times.

This is given deeper meaning when you consider, as detailed later, the real jobs both avoided and outright killed from this sort of make work.” (from Power Grab Chapter 6, “Green Eggs and Scam: the Wholesale Fraud of ‘Green Jobs’; citations are omitted)

And of course the “green jobs” claims are distinct in that they are part and parcel of an agenda that kills many more jobs, real jobs traded for far fewer temporary jobs (obvious examples of which we are starkly reminded of again today), on top of the opportunity cost of moving resources from productive to uneconomic uses.

All of which is to say that the same crowd is using the same tricks to fool the same people into accepting the same agenda of massively transferring wealth and liberties from you to the state.