The entire Obama presidency in one anecdote

http://blog.american.com/

By James Pethokoukis

One of my favorite moments from the new book The Escape Artists: How Obama’s Team Fumbled the Recovery:

Energy was a particular obsession of the president-elect’s, and therefore a particular source of frustration. Week after week, [White House economic adviser Christina] Romer would march in with an estimate of the jobs all the investments in clean energy would produce; week after week, Obama would send her back to check the numbers. “I don’t get it,” he’d say. “We make these large-scale investments in infrastructure. What do you mean, there are no jobs?” But the numbers rarely budged.

I recalled that snippet when reading this Reuters story today: “Obama’s ‘green jobs’ have been slow to sprout.” Some highlights:

Three weeks ago, President Barack Obama stood in front of a sea of gleaming solar panels in Boulder City, Nevada, to celebrate his administration’s efforts to promote “green energy.” Stretching row upon row into the desert, the Copper Mountain Solar Project not far from Las Vegas provided an impressive backdrop for the president.  Built on public land, the facility is the largest of its kind in the United States. Its 1 million solar panels provide enough energy to power 17,000 homes.
And it employs just 10 people.
Three years after Obama launched a push to build a job-creating “green” economy, the White House can say that more than 1 million drafty homes have been retrofitted to lower heating and cooling costs, while energy generation from renewable sources such as wind and solar has nearly doubled since 2008.
But the millions of “green jobs” Obama promised have been slow to sprout, disappointing many who had hoped that the $90 billion earmarked for clean-energy efforts in the recession-fighting federal stimulus package would ease unemployment – still above 8 percent in March.

Some other tidbits:

– A $500 million job-training program has so far helped fewer than 20,000 people find work, far short of its goal.

– On the campaign trail in 2008, Obama promised that a $150 billion investment would generate 5 million jobs over 10 years.

– The White House said in November 2010 that its clean-energy efforts had generated work for 225,000 people and would ultimately create a total of 827,000 “job years” – implying average annual employment of around 200,000 over the four years of Obama’s presidential term.

– The wind industry, for example, has shed 10,000 jobs since 2009 even as the energy capacity of wind farms has nearly doubled, according to the American Wind Energy Association. Meanwhile, the oil and gas industry has added 75,000 jobs since Obama took office, according to Labor Department statistics.

– ”They were obviously just guessing,” said Robert Pollin, a University of Massachusetts professor and green-energy supporter who helped the Energy Department sort through loan applications. “If an undergraduate gave me a paper of that quality I would have probably given them a C or a C-plus.”

– By the end of 2011, some 16,092 participants had found new work in a “green” field, according to the Labor Department – roughly one-fifth of its target. The program also helped employed workers upgrade their skills.

When ideology meets markets, markets always win unless government puts a big, fat thumb on the scale. And, eventually, markets will still win.