Tuesday, August 16, 2011

I can only hope that Warren Buffett's tax dollars paid for this program

Seattle's 'green jobs' program a bust
Last year, Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn announced the city had won a coveted $20 million federal grant to invest in weatherization. The unglamorous work of insulating crawl spaces and attics had emerged as a silver bullet in a bleak economy – able to create jobs and shrink carbon footprint – and the announcement came with great fanfare.

But more than a year later, Seattle's numbers are lackluster. As of last week, only three homes had been retrofitted and just 14 new jobs have emerged from the program. Many of the jobs are administrative, and not the entry-level pathways once dreamed of for low-income workers.

The city had applied for the grant at a time of eco-giddiness, when former Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels was out-greening all other politicians except for Al Gore.

Woo, of Got Green, thinks the city needs to throw more money on incentives.

It was only a few days ago when I talked about politicians trying to out-green each other and now $20 million dollars has gone towards administration and putting insulation in three homes. (hint: you can buy insulation at Lowes or Home Depot and it is much much less expensive)

But even if we pretend that this had created thousands of jobs it's still just government make-work. They could pay half the country to dig holes and the other half to dig ditches but that doesn't make us an economic powerhouse.

If Obama's rich friends insist that taxes need to be raised I would hope that they will just start cutting checks for this kind of stuff.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

This has been tried before in the great depression. The various jobs programs, like WPA or CCC redistributed money from the tax payers to a few workers. But it did not do anything to end the depression. Taxing productive people to fund programs that hire people to do things of questionable value cannot somehow pull us out of this depression.

Anonymous said...

Wow, Daniel implies he knows more than someone who knows the economy enough to make billions of dollars.

Nice.

DAVE01 said...

When is ole Warren going to write a check to the US government for 30 billion dollars? Why doesn't he put his money where his mouth is? When is obama's friend Soro going to write a fat check to the US government? Hell, I would appreciate it if Obama's friends GE stop taking subsidies for their green energy fantasies and start paying their fair share of taxes.

Anonymous said...

Buffet may indeed be brilliant but that does not mean he gives good advice. He may be playing the rest of us so he can make even more money. I believe this is the technique George Soros used to become a billionaire. Don't be so naive.

Anonymous said...

LOL @8:04 - Bust out the tin foil!

The thing about politicians is that most of them are novice politicians. Guys like Warren Buffet, however, absolutely have to know the economy to thrive in their chosen industry. And I would say, based on how much $$ Buffet makes, he has a pretty solid grasp of what monetary and fiscal policy does to the economy.

If you're looking for Buffet's motives behind his op-ed, how about the fact that the American economy tanking would be bad business for him?

I hear Republican candidates talking about how they need a businessman to run this country to get it back on track. If that's the case, why aren't we taking advice from one of the most successful businessmen in the world?