You may have noticed how so much legislation proposed or enacted by Congress these days comes with a promise that it will “create jobs.”
The biggest and most harmful of those laws was last year’s $862 billion “stimulus bill.” It “created jobs” all right — but many of those jobs were in government, adding to the budget deficit, while private-sector employment was collapsing.
Of course, it’s easy to see why many bills proposed in Congress nowadays are called “jobs legislation”: Unemployment is an awful 9.9 percent, and millions more Americans who want full-time work can find only part-time jobs. What could be more politically popular than a promise of more jobs “created” by the federal government?
Alas, assurances that this or that legislation will create jobs have not faded despite the colossal failure of the “stimulus.”
Now, Democrats in the Senate have proposed “anti-global-warming” legislation, and as you might guess, they say it will “create millions of energy-related jobs,” The Associated Press reported.
The bill is 987 pages long, and we plead “guilty” up front to not having read those 987 pages — as we suspect many of even its Senate supporters have not done.
But troubling hints of what the massive bill would do are emerging, and it seems more likely to destroy economic growth than to foster it.
The bill would force industry to slash so-called “greenhouse gas” emissions by at least 80 percent over the next four decades. Those “greenhouse gases” are created by the production of energy from abundant and fairly cheap fuel sources such as coal. Coal does produce objectionable emissions, though technology has made the process much cleaner than it used to be. But as fashionable as alternative fuels such as wind and solar power may be, they are extremely expensive and simply are not practical ways to meet our nation’s energy needs.
The bill also offers a confusing mix of new and unconstitutional subsidies. Its sponsors plainly realize the legislation would raise energy prices, because the bill would establish a new program to help the poor pay the higher energy bills that the legislation would create.
Supporters of the anti-global-warming bill seem unfazed by the fact that most Americans do not consider climate change nearly so serious a threat as terrorism, unemployment and other national priorities. Early this year, a survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that Americans put global warming dead last among 21 concerns ranging from crime to deficit reduction to jobs. In fact, concern about global warming has actually dropped 10 percentage points since Pew first included it on the survey in 2007.
So far, not a single Republican has offered to back the Democrat-proposed anti-global-warming bill. The non-supporters are right. Excessive government spending has not solved our current economic problems. There is no reason to believe that another huge, complex federal law to fight “global warming” will do anything other than harm our economy further.