A waste of taxpayer funds

Harrison Price captures the "rent-seeking" of large automotive firms and their government enablers perfectly:

Chevrolet received about $52 billion from the U.S. taxpayer and another $9.5 billion from the Canadian taxpayer. The company is still a mess and its newest product – touted by Liberals everywhere and driven for ten feet by President Obama – is the Volt… an electric car. The car will be sold (at huge losses) for about $41,000.00. each.

During the height of the bailout, President Obama touted the Volt as a symbol of how Chevy was going to “make it” thanks to the help of great products like it and the wallets of the American taxpayer. The Volt’s batteries are made by a South Korean company (which received $150 million in U.S. taxpayer monies).

Now, it turns out, the Volt isn’t even an electric car… it’s a fancy hybrid like the Civic or Prius.

What?

Rainbows and Unicorns

The porkulus bill created three million jobs? BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!

Where are the jobs?

Some California counties posting Depression era unemployment numbers. Where are the "green" jobs, Mr. Obama?

Crony capitalism lives on with Obama

John Stossel on crony capitalism, regulatory capture, "green jobs," and the farce of the "Recovery Act."

Chrysler Nixes Electric Car Program

Sooo, after Chrysler lured taxpayer funds from the hands of our elected representatives, they have since decided to axe the "Green" cars that they marketed as payment for government aid. Of course, Barack Obama was quick on the draw to give aid to Chrysler partly based on its newly found "Green" conversion. That didn't last long. Once again, the taxpayer ends up being a sucker.

Blue Staters running to Red States...and fast!

From Forbes:

For the past decade a large coterie of pundits, prognosticators and their media camp followers have insisted that growth in America would be concentrated in places hip and cool, largely the bluish regions of the country...This narrative, which has not changed much over the past decade, is misleading and largely misstated. Net migration, both before and after the Great Recession, according to analysis by the Praxis Strategy Group, has continued to be strongest to the predominately red states of the South and Intermountain West.

This seems true even for those seeking high-end jobs. Between 2006 and 2008, the metropolitan areas that enjoyed the fastest percentage shift toward educated and professional workers and industries included nominally "unhip" places like Indianapolis, Charlotte, N.C., Memphis, Tenn., Salt Lake City, Jacksonville, Fla., Tampa, Fla., and Kansas City, Mo.

The overall migration numbers are even more revealing. As was the case for much of the past decade, the biggest gainers continue to include cities such as San Antonio, Dallas and Houston. Rather than being oases for migrants, some oft-cited magnets such as New York, Boston, Los Angeles and Chicago have all suffered considerable loss of population to other regions over the past year.

It seems that the "smart and hip" like low taxes, jobs, and livable surroundings just like the hicks that they constantly vilify. One last point from the article:

Virtually all the top 10 economies that have withstood the recession come from outside the "youth-magnet" field: San Antonio; Oklahoma City; Little Rock, Ark.; Dallas, Baton Rouge, La.; Tulsa, Okla., Omaha, Neb.; Houston and El Paso, Texas.

I may be needing a change of scenery if employment doesn't improve around here.

George Will And Don Quixote

Subsidized windmills in Spain cost more than just failing to create substantial "green jobs."

Calzada, 36, an economics professor at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, has produced a report that, if true, is inconvenient for the Obama administration's green agenda, and for some budget assumptions that are dependent upon it.

Calzada says Spain's torrential spending -- no other nation has so aggressively supported production of electricity from renewable sources -- on wind farms and other forms of alternative energy has indeed created jobs. But Calzada's report concludes that they often are temporary and have received $752,000 to $800,000 each in subsidies -- wind industry jobs cost even more, $1.4 million each. And each new job entails the loss of 2.2 other jobs that are either lost or not created in other industries because of the political allocation -- sub-optimum in terms of economic efficiency -- of capital. (European media regularly report "eco-corruption" leaving a "footprint of sleaze" -- gaming the subsidy systems, profiteering from land sales for wind farms, etc.) Calzada says the creation of jobs in alternative energy has subtracted about 110,000 jobs elsewhere in Spain's economy.

Free market advocates have been warning for years that subsidizing industries deemed environmentally friendly by politicians that pander to environmentalists will not create enough jobs to justify the taxpayer expense. Clearly, from the Spanish example cited above, the result of government investing in "green" jobs has not panned out as the rhetoric claimed. Obama rode to the White House on the promise and hope that government "investment" in green industries would spur a wave of green collar jobs. Spain has tried "green investment" and it has turned out to be a very expensive fantasy. Why should we try the same expensive and fantastical experiment?