Feeding the masses on unicorn ribs:

Let me put it this way. A GOP candidate might feel a need to please creationist voters and say a few nice things about intelligent design. That is politics as usual; it gins up the base and drive the opposition insane with fury and rage. No harm, really, and no foul.

But if that same politician then proposed to base federal health policy on a hunt for the historical Garden of Eden so that we could replace Medicare by feeding old people on fruit from the Tree of Life, he would have gone from quackery-as-usual to raving incompetence. True, the Tree of Life approach polls well in GOP focus groups: no cuts to Medicare benefits, massive tax savings, no death panels, Biblical values on display. Its only flaw is that there won’t be any magic free fruit that lets us live forever, and sooner or later people will notice that and be unhappy.

Green jobs are the Democratic equivalent of Tree of Life Medicare; they scratch every itch of every important segment of the base and if they actually existed they would be an excellent policy choice. But since they are no more available to solve our jobs problem than the Tree of Life stands ready to make health care affordable, a green jobs policy boils down to a promise to feed the masses on tasty unicorn ribs from the Great Invisible Unicorn Herd that only the greens can see.

Here in particular Senator Obama as he then was would have benefited from a less gushing, more skeptical press. If his first couple of speeches on this topic had been met with the incredulous and even mocking response they deserved, he probably would not have married himself so publicly to so vain and so empty a cause.

Funny, we warned them about this a couple years ago. But they never learn.

And of course, the sensible among us knew that it would be disaster for sure when the president put an avowed communist in charge of it.

[Update a while later]

Is the global warming hysteria running out of gas?

Where is President Obama, who promised that on his accession “the rise of the oceans will start to slow and the planet begin to heal?” – surely the most fatuous declaration in the history of politics. Well, he appears to be giving speeches every second day, but none of them feature the retreating oceans or our healed planet.

In fact he’s been tooling around in a $2-million bus oblivious of the carbon costs, and there simply hasn’t been any signal that his White House is giving the great Gore crusade anything but the barest of rhetorical support. If there were any political value to ardent greensmanship, surely a President who is floundering on the economy and sinking in the polls would have grabbed that raft with a passion.

But there isn’t anymore. Perhaps the recession has tamed the imaginations of most people and their governments. In tight economic times people are naturally unwilling to engage in the comicbook fantasies of the wilder environmentalists. Perhaps Climategate gave a too-souring glimpse into the mixture of science and advocacy that has, to some extent, corrupted both. Perhaps, finally, the unctuousness, sanctimony and sputtering righteousness of the highprofile environmentalists signal to most observers that they aren’t really as certain of all this “science” as they pretend to be. Either way this long green game has lost its fundamental energies. The celebrities will find another wristband; the politicians will find a new vague distraction.

Let’s hope.

He made it, and continues to make it himself.

In the last Congress we saw the passage of two of the biggest expansions in federal regulatory power in decades (and possibly ever). Obama’s health care law and the Dodd-Frank financial legislation were each about 2,000 pages of broad grants of authority and discretion to regulators, the implications of which are just now beginning to be felt.

On top of that we’ve seen an astonishing train wreck of new energy regulations from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), including an aggressive effort to discover elements of the failed Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade legislation inside the forty-year-old Clean Air Act. The EPA is now contemplating its most aggressively anti-jobs regulation: an out-of-cycle re-proposal of smog rules that would ratchet down levels so far beyond what is necessary for public health that nearly the whole country would be judged “out of attainment” and over seven millions jobs would be lost. The EPA is also attempting to impose an absurd 54.5 mile-per-gallon fuel economy standard that will take any car worth driving off the market.

Not to be outdone, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) is intent on rewarding the union bosses with elements of the failed card check legislation, including an effort to allow unions to impose ambush elections – before workers have an opportunity to understand the costs associated with forming a union. Most chilling from the NLRB is the effort of their acting, not confirmed, general counsel Lafe Solomon to dictate to Boeing (and, by precedent, all potential employers) where they can locate facilities that employ thousands of people.

It’s worth reprising the old Heinlein quote: “Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as ‘bad luck.’”

[Update a while later]

You don’t say. The Democrats’ “green jobs” plan is a bust:

The skepticism from Waters and Cleaver comes after a Washington Post-ABC poll, published July 26, found serious erosion in liberal Democratic support for Obama’s jobs policies. “The number of liberal Democrats who strongly support Obama’s record on jobs plunged 22 points from 53 percent last year to 31 percent,” the Post reported.

That skepticism is based on real-world evidence. “In the Bay Area as in much of the country, the green economy is not proving to be the job-creation engine that many politicians envisioned,” says the New York Times in a new report from California. “President Obama once pledged to create five million green jobs over 10 years. Gov. Jerry Brown promised 500,000 clean-technology jobs statewide by the end of the decade. But the results so far suggest such numbers are a pipe dream.”

For example, the paper reports that California received $186 million in the stimulus bill for the purpose of weatherizing homes. So far, the state has spent about half of the money and created the equivalent of 538 jobs. “The weatherization program was initially delayed for seven months while the federal Department of Labor determined prevailing wage standards for the industry,” the Times reports. “Even after that issue was resolved, the program never really caught on as homeowners balked at the upfront costs.”

Unexpectedly!

But of course, the president being the president, he doubles down on the idiocy:

Nevertheless, President Obama continues to focus much of his economic efforts on green jobs. When he travels the country to highlight various industries, he often chooses renewable energy firms. And when he talks to supporters about his work to grow the economy, it’s often in terms of green jobs.

What was that old saying about the definition of insanity?

[Update a few minutes later]

Atlas is sort of shrugging:

Every president lets slip a smear now and then. The key is that there should be little consistency or frequency in his targeting. But with Obama there is both monotony and predictability. He clearly does not like private businesses — except the super wealthy who are liberal and share his refined tastes and politics and have enough millions in “unneeded income” that they figure they will either die before or weather through our transition to European democratic socialism.

Of course, one Huey Long–like “fat cat,” an occasional adolescent “millionaires and billionaires,” a once-in-a-while juvenile “corporate jet owners,” a few 1960s-like “spread the wealth” or “redistributive change” slips, a single petulant “unneeded income,” or a sole pop-philosophizing “at some point you’ve made enough money,” or even on occasion the old socialist boilerplate “those who make over $250,000 should pay their fair share” in isolation are tolerable. But string them together and even the tire store owner and pharmaceutical rep are aroused from their 70-hour weeks, and start to conclude, “Hmmm, this guy doesn’t like me or what I do, and I better make the necessary adjustments.” And, believe me, they are making the necessary adjustments.

They’re waiting for a new president, and Congress. Less than a year and a half to go.

[Update a while later]

The president’s priorities:

It will not be lost on many Americans that the president found time before going on vacation to issue an order regarding racial bean-counting, but deferred issuing a plan to increase the overall number of jobs until sometime in September. The question is whether this is more a reflection of the administration’s priorities or of its competencies.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say both.

[Mid-morning update]

Regulators chasing farmers off the farms. More bad luck, I guess.

As the state continues to hemorrhage jobs and businesses, Jerry Brown is doubling down on the fiscal insanity.

[Update a few minutes later]

Politifact ad homs Bob Poole on the Florida project, and gets the numbers wrong. He responds at Reason.

An illuminating post. For the record, I don’t think that jobs can be created that well by a chief executive. But they can be destroyed, or prevented from being created, and the president has been doing that with a vengeance since he took office (before, in fact, with his campaign rhetoric).

…and his fiscal innumeracy. But he supports Barack Obama, so that’s OK.

[Update a while later]

Stop coddling Warren Buffett:

The statistic I would like to see is the amount of tax paid relative to consumption. By that measure, it is possible that Buffett’s tax rate was more than 100 percent.

I do not care if he pays very little tax on saving. I would rather he pay zero tax on saving. His taxes are too high, not too low.

That doesn’t fit the narrative.