There’s No Free Green Lunch

With all of the money the Fed’s been pumping into the economy, one would think things would have stabilized by now. Yet, November’s job loss numbers tell us things quickly went from bad to worse.

Tom Blumer analyzed the data and was only able to come to one conclusion.

Based on my review of Bureau of Labor Statistics data … the negative swing of 947,000 from November 2007 to November 2008 appears to the worst one month year-over-year turndown since World War II (to be fair, other negative swings in the distant past are probably a higher percentage of the labor force at the time).

As I said earlier today at BizzyBlog about what Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, Harry Reid, and the Democratic Party have done to this economy during the past six months:

It’s simply amazing what promising to choke off a country’s energy supplies (all three of them did so in June), promising to radically raise taxes (Obama did, and the others have been on board, for at least 18 months before the presidential election), and having a decades-in-the-making wreck of the housing and mortgage-lending industries come to a head (a Democratic Party group effort going back to the late 1970s) can do.

The record November decay…has yet another cause. Something must have happened in late October and early November to have made things even worse. I wonder what that possibly could have been? Read full story at NewsBusters.

What is it the CEOs and hiring managers know? Could it be they look to California, the leader in massive spending on green technology, for a preview of what the rest of us are in for? Although California’s politicians such as Barbara Boxer maintain that their green initiatives are helping the economy, economists disagree. As pointed out by The Chamber Post:

Clearly, the state of California decided that it had to show that AB 32 was good for its economy. But what good will California’s conclusions do if reality proves them wrong?

More troubling, however, is the fact that such skewed economic reports on the benefits of domestic-only climate policies proliferate, and are shaping the beliefs of our policymakers. Highly respected and accomplished lawmakers like Chairman Boxer and her colleagues presumably took California’s modeling of AB 32 at face value, and believed that the net effect of the law would be to help California’s economy.  They may be right. But the comments by Dr. Stavins, Dr. Kahn, and others suggest that AB 32 will hurt, not help, California.

As Congress considers climate legislation and other greenhouse gas policies in 2009, it is imperative that our elected officials be given an accurate set of economic projections for the bills they will vote on.  It is inevitable that the assumptions and conclusions in these economic studies will vary, but all must be considered.  To view climate policy only through rose-colored glasses would be a mistake the American economy may not be able to withstand. Read Full Story.

All signs point to the incoming administration taking radical action in the name of global climate change. Barack Obama is promising to ’invest’ billions of taxpayer dollars in green techonology. That doesn’t bode well for the American people or our economy.