Spain's Experience Proves That Obama's "Green Jobs" Are In Fact Lost Jobs

Spain tried the same destructive plan Obama is pushing. Indeed, Obama specifically cites Spain as his northstar.

So how did their garden of green jobs grow?

Based upon the Spanish experience that President Oprompter expressly cited as a model, if he succeeded in his (oddly floating) promise to further intervene in the economy to create 3 million (or is it 5 million?) "green jobs," the U.S. should expect to directly kill by the same programs at least 6.6 million (or as many as 11 million) jobs elsewhere in the economy.

That is because green jobs schemes in Spain killed 2.2 jobs per job created, or about 9 existing jobs — I'll call them "real" jobs — lost for every 4 that are created. The latter, the study shows, then become wards of the state, dependent on the continuation of the mandates and subsidies, subject to the ritual boom and bust of artifically concocted jobs (read: ethanol).

This does not include jobs lost due to redirection of resources, but are only the jobs directly killed by the scheme.

The study calculates that since 2000, Spain spent €571,138 to create each “green job,” including subsidies of more than €1 million per wind-industry job.
Each “green” megawatt installed destroys 5.39 jobs on average elsewhere in the economy: 8.99 by photovoltaics, 4.32 by wind energy, 5.84 by mini-hydro.

And Spain's direct costs for these jobs, not even counting the lost jobs and lost tax revenues and higher unemployment benefits? $100,000 per job, per year.

This is a simple enough matter: If you make the cost of energy more dependent on manpower -- "more jobs" -- it inflates the cost of energy. This is not rocket science, here. If a shirt costs $4 to make when I have one guy making it, sure, I can have three guys making it in a less efficient manner, and sure, I'll have created two jobs. Trouble is -- the shirt now costs $10 to make and I can sell less of them.

The same thing happens with energy. These "green jobs" simply represent additions to the most serious cost of producing anything, namely, human labor. Yes, I can "add" green jobs by forcing energy producers to produce energy less efficiently and more expensively. Taking it to an extreme, I can simply pay ten million people to jog inside giant hamster-wheels 24 hours per day, producing electricity in that manner.

So sure, I'll have "created" ten million jobs.

Trouble is, now I am selling a kilowatt of energy for a thousand bucks, thus destroying all industry that relies on energy, which is to say, all of them. And as everything now costs more, people can buy less stuff, and businesses either cut back on production (jobs, that is, just so President Profits to Earnings Ration gets what I mean) and many more businesses go out of business entirely. I have created ten million jobs at the expense of thirty or forty or fifty million jobs.

But of course those unemployed legions are now directly dependent on President Uhh-bama for their sustenance, which I'm starting to think is a feature, not a bug.

posted by Ace at 04:30 PM

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