The American Spectator

Over at Heritage David Kreutzer deals a deathblow to the administration’s claims of minimal impact from  its offshore drilling moratorium. In the process he also begs other questions about administration stimulus claims and its honesty, generally.

When reading this, recall for example the Spanish ‘green jobs’ expose, that there the state took at least two times the resources to create a job than the private sector requires, and often much more; a temporary windmill job cost the Spanish taxpayer $750,000 and up.

Further differences accrue, for example that private sector jobs are created in response to demand, means they are better considered ‘permanent’, while jobs derived from government ‘stimulus’ are inherently Census jobs: they disappear the minute the government underwriting does (in Spain, 9 out of 10 ‘green jobs’ created by the state were temporary). That is the peril of politically crafting economic activity.

As David adds about oil, producing it adds another wealth-generating element to the economy; make-work of the type the stimulus targeted generally does not. In fact, ‘green jobs’ typically do the opposite, adding an inefficiency with economi redundancy (no wind farm has ever resulted in the shut down of a hydrocarbon production facility; those are needed as, ahem, ‘backup’ for things that work with about a 16-20% load factor. Transferring wealth to subsidize, or making people buy, vastly more expensive energy also compounds things).

Also for example, what we know about Los Angeles’ ‘stimulus’ experience — 55 jobs created at about $2 million each — indicates that, with the administration deriving its stimulus jobs figure simply from assuming a job was created for every $92,000, well, there should be some burgs with thousands and thousands of jobs created.

That should be easy to find. Possibly even the administration could do so? But, since it is the same crowd willing to see no harm in its drilling moratorium, who can impose a moratorium on a major domestic source of oil while claiming they’re trying to reduce our use of foreign oil, that can so readily change its standards and formulae to support whatever it wants to claim, well, maybe not.