From today’s Wall Street Journal editorial page:
One of President Obama’s applause lines is that his climate tax policies will create new green jobs “that can’t be outsourced.” But if that’s true, why is his main energy adviser floating a new carbon tariff on imports? Welcome to the coming cap and trade war.
“Cap and trade” is just another assault on American businesses that will drive more manufacturing overseas and decrease employment here in the U.S. Obama is utterly delusional if he thinks this will “create jobs”.
The economic fallacy of which he is guilty in this case is that of confusing “need” and “demand”. He believes cap and trade will create a “need” for green jobs, i.e. a “need” to build all sorts of alternative power generation technologies — and it might very well.
But “need” and “demand” are two different things. After WWII, for instance, there was a great “need” for replacement construction in bombed-out Europe, and many economists predicted this “need” would lead to a construction boom. But the Europeans didn’t have billions of extra dollars sitting around to pay for new construction, so no boom occurred.
So even if the “need” for green jobs is created, the spare money to pay for them doesn’t exist — whatever is spent on creating new “green jobs” will come at the expense of spending that supports other jobs. Any new jobs created will be cancelled by existing jobs that are lost.
Obama is a fool advised by fools. He is going down in flames — and he’s taking us with him.