George Rebane

The very liberal truthout.com is definitely worth a read as we attempt to understand the sparse reasoning behind their collectivist nostrums.  The latest edition contains an article – Green Recovery: A Program to Create Good Jobs and Start Building a Low-Carbon Economy – on how to create two million “green jobs” by four economists(??) from the leftwing Political Economy Research Institute.  They claim that a “$100 billion investment” by the government will put all these additional people to work on a track to solid green.

The study reported in this article was prepared “under commission by the Center for American Progress and released by a coalition of labor and environmental groups. The authors are Robert Pollin, Heidi Garrett-Peltier, James Heintz, and Helen Scharber of PERI.”  Now you know that if a conservative policy analysis outfit did such a study that was sponsored by any wealth creating or condoning enterprise, the left would claim that the results were prima facie biased because of the sponsorship.  There is no need here to make a counter claim against the professed PERI study, its results are simply ludicrous as they stand.

Most people know that a government can print money and put ANY NUMBER of people to work doing ANYTHING – but only for a while.  There is nothing market sustainable in the green jobs that PERI has discovered, and the inevitable result will be an economic collapse as has occurred with so many socialist and communist state-sponsored enterprises during the last century.  It is hard to imagine who else besides “a coalition of labor and environmental groups” would sponsor such studies from PERI, save perhaps Raul Castro and Hugo Chavez.

Just ask yourself one simple question – ‘The feds are already printing and spending trillions of dollars in their economic recovery programs, if the PERI study has any credibility, why stop with a $100 billion “investment”, why not take one of those new trillions and create ten million new green jobs and completely wipe out unemployment, then we would be off on a rip-roaring start to a new age of squeaky clean green?’