Some hard facts keep getting in the way of claims that the $787 billion federal “stimulus” will create lots of “green energy” jobs in the United States.
About $2 billion of the stimulus has been spent on wind energy projects. But a study by researchers at American University in Washington found that about $1.6 billion — or 80 percent — of that money is going to foreign companies that build wind equipment.
“Most of the jobs are going overseas,” one of the researchers told ABC News after studying how much U.S. stimulus money the foreign companies received. “According to our estimates, about 6,000 jobs have been created overseas, and maybe a couple hundred have been created in the U.S.”
In fact, even those few U.S. jobs are questionable. American companies that build wind energy equipment told McClatchy Newspapers they actually cut nearly 2,000 jobs in 2009. Meanwhile, a manufacturer in Spain got $577 million of the stimulus’ wind power funding. And Communist China is expected to get the lion’s share of 2,000 manufacturing jobs for a stimulus-funded wind farm in Texas.
Even extremely liberal Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., was outraged by the foreign job creation at the expense of U.S. taxpayers.
“It makes people lose faith in government, and it frankly infuriates me,” Sen. Schumer, who backed the stimulus, told ABC.
We are not protectionists, and we believe in free international trade. But the explicit goal of the massive, Democrat-approved “stimulus” was to create plenty of private-sector jobs in America, not overseas. Instead, most of the jobs “created or saved” in the United States have been in government, while workers in the much larger private sector have been laid off in droves. And now we learn that the stimulus is “stimulating” the creation of foreign jobs.
There have been calls for Congress to pull back some of the billions of stimulus dollars that have not yet been spent. Those calls should be heeded, because the stimulus has a dreadfully counterproductive track record so far.