Is this a smart way to create jobs?

By Tom Quiner

Job creation is the job of government. No one else can do it better.

This is the view of the president and his party.

The Democratic Party’s approach to job creation has been given a rigorous workout, and it has failed.

They have taken tax payer money, borrowed even more from China, and redistributed it to public employee unions and politically-correct corporations in the “green energy” industry.

The poster child for the president’s job creation approach was Solyndra, Inc.  They received a half-a-billion of tax payer’s (and China’s) money to build better solar cells.

The company is going bust. Taxpayers are left holding the bag (but not China, to whom we have to repay the money we borrowed to “stimulate” our economy).

In a previous post (The U.S. can control its energy destiny), I talked about the flaw in the president’s approach:

The president has a skewed vision on how to accomplish this. His vision is a massive infusion of taxpayer money into the creation of “green jobs.” The liberal Apollo Alliance guestimates it’ll take 20 times the annual budget of the Department of Energy to create five million jobs. So how much will all this job creation cost us? Five hundred BILLION dollars, or $100,000 per job.

Okay, the president’s plan failed. He learned from his mistakes, right?

We could only wish.

The president has proposed a massive, new $450 billion job creation package, even though this approach was tried on a grander scale before and failed.

The most optimistic guesstimate on how many jobs this will create comes from a Moody’s economist, Mark Zendi, who projects maybe 1.9 million will be “saved” or created.

The cost to taxpayers? How about $236,000 per job?

Is this a smart way to create jobs?