Tag Archives: Green job

Where Did The Money Go ?

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We all understand that federal spending has increased under President Obama. We also know that the economy is limping along rather than following the path of a traditional recovery. We have had stimulus packages and Quantitative easing (QE), and we are still struggling.

Yesterday the Washington Times posted an article about the money invested in green energy.

The article reports:

Only 38 percent of those who have completed training got jobs based on it, and only 16 percent kept jobs for at least six months — the key measure of success for the program.

“Outcomes for participants were far less than originally proposed,” the auditors said.

The government earmarked more than $400 million for green jobs training programs, and $328.5 million has been spent so far.

About half were already working in the energy sector and wanted retraining, and half were potential new energy workers.

Of those workers who already had energy-sector jobs, the auditors said they were retrained, even though they didn’t need it.

A 16 percent success rate is nothing to brag about. So what was the stimulus to green energy about?  The truth comes out in the last paragraph of the article:

Mr. Issa [Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.)]said in addition to poor performance records, the green jobs money “served as a slush fund” for the Obama administration to dole out payments to allies “like the National Council of La Raza, the Blue Green alliance and the U.S. Steelworkers Union.”

This is one example of many reasons taxes on working Americans can easily be cut.

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How’s That Green Jobs Thing Working For You ?

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Breitbart.com reported yesterday that President Obama’s ‘green jobs‘ initiative has not worked very well. The source of their story was a Reuters story that had been posted on Friday.

Since 2009, although the energy capacity of wind farms has almost doubled, the industry has lost 10,000 jobs. During that same time period, the oil and gas industry have created 75,000 jobs.

Reuters reports:

The program’s (the $500 million job-training program that aims to train workers for skills they would need in a new “green economy“) initial results were so poor that the Labor Department‘s inspector general recommended last fall that the agency should return the $327 million that remained unspent.

The numbers have improved somewhat since then, but the department remains far short of its goal of placing 80,000 workers into green jobs by 2013.

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.

At some point are we going to stop wasting taxpayer money on things that don’t work? This is a glaring example of a place where the federal budget could be seriously cut without endangering anyone’s existence.

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The Evolution Of A Story

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Yesterday The Blaze posted an example of how a story can be changed after it is posted on the Internet so it does not hurt the Obama Administration. The story in question was posted at CNN Money.

The original story stated:

“As Kermit knows, it’s not easy being green,” the story began. “There were only 3.1 million green jobs in the U.S. in 2010.”

Later, after the revisions, the story stated:

“Kermit has more company lately.

“There were 3.1 million green jobs in the U. S. in 2010, or about 2.4% of the nation’s employment.”

The information has not changed–the slant has.

The Blaze concludes:

“The Bureau of Labor Statistics just released its first tally of jobs associated with producing green goods and services,” the story says (take these numbers with a grain of salt; the administration uses an extraordinarily loose definition for the term “green job“).

“The utilities industry — which includes nuclear and hydroelectric power generation — has the highest share of green jobs, at nearly 12 percent, while the construction industry comes in second at 6.8 percent. Some 5.3 percent of federal government jobs are green,” it adds.

In fact, as reported yesterday on The Blaze, the federal government has invested billions of taxpayer dollars in agency-related “green” energy initiatives.

Which brings us back to the original point: for the amount of money that has been poured into “green” energy, 2.4 percent of the nation’s workforce hardly seems like a fair return on investment.

The whole thing makes me want to see a real definition of a ‘green job.’

 

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