Good news: Pretty much everything counts as a “green job” now

From today’s House Committee on Oversight hearing, an exciting new book-cooking venture from the administration that brought you “jobs created or saved” and whose recent “gains” on unemployment have been driven in large part by discouraged workers dropping out of the labor force. Darrell Issa’s been focused on their “green jobs” calculations for months and finally got his chance to grill a BLS bigwig on their bean-counting:

Issa suggested the administration is reclassifying such jobs to prove that billions of taxpayer dollars, through the federal stimulus program, have created green, or environmentally-focused jobs — a major initiative for President Obama…

The Bureau of Labor Statistics states a green job is either: a business that produces goods or provide services that benefit the environment or conserve natural resources, or a job in which a worker’s duties involve making their establishment’s production processes more environmentally friendly or use fewer natural resources…

Diana Furchtgott-Roth, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor of RealClearMarkets.com, said the administration should be focused on simply creating jobs, not classifying them.

She cited the administration putting $3.5 million into the failed Solyndra solar-energy company as an example of the administration appearing to misleadingly or incorrectly tout green-job creation.

Four years ago, Obama promised more than once that he’d create five million “green jobs” over the next decade. Thanks to the magic of reclassification, sounds like he might already have gotten there. And the punchline is, this is all basically useless for him politically: No one outside the furthest reaches of the left will care inside the voting booth what O’s “green jobs” record is so long as baseline economic numbers are as grisly as they are now. And since Congress is almost guaranteed to be redder next year, Obama will have even less leeway on his crony-capitalist “green loans” program even if he ends up getting reelected. Still, if this nonsense ensures a steady supply of videos as entertaining as this, I guess it’s not wholly useless. Bring on the “green” oil lobbyists.



SOURCE: Hot Air