A pair of years-old anecdotes, recently revisited, show that top economists in the White House and Obama’s cabinet expressed serious doubts about the White House’s emphasis on and approach to green jobs. Three top economic advisers, on at least two occasions, have sounded alarms about that agenda. In October 2010, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and then-director of the National Economic Council Larry Summers warned that the oversight of the Energy Department’s loan guarantee programs – one of which financed defunct solar company Solyndra – was too lax, the Los Angeles …
The Obama Administration has been knee-deep in scandal after green energy “model” Solyndra went bankrupt less than two years after receiving a $500 million loan guarantee from the federal government. Now, they are up against another controversy. Days before a recent deadline, the Department of Energy brazenly approved two additional loans for more than $1 billion for solar energy projects in the Obama Administration’s green jobs program. The latest ill-fated ventures include a $737 million loan guarantee to Solar Reserve for a 110-megawatt solar tower on federal land in Nevada …
Catching you up on clips, commentary and news of the day. Sign up for the daily email update from Scribe. Renewable Red Ink – Ed Feulner, The Washington Times Speaking the truth about right and wrong – Jennifer A. Marshall, The Heritage Foundation Strikes are reasonable, but not a cure-all – James Jay Carafano, Desert News 5 Major Ways The Obama Administration Is Killing American Jobs – John Hawkins, Townhall Pressure grows for US to list Haqqani network as foreign terrorist group – Jonathan S. Landay, The Kansas City Star …
Solyndra’s bankruptcy has put federal spending for green projects under the microscope—and rightly so. Green jobs programs have been a profoundly wasteful use of taxpayers’ money and are doing more harm to the economy than helping it. They don’t even provide the promised grand environmental benefits. It’s important to keep these points in mind when discussing green jobs. 1.) Government spending does not create jobs. Government spending will “create” jobs in the sense that subsidies will allocate labor and capital to build windmills and solar panels. But the government is …
The bankruptcy of solar energy company Solyndra is making national headlines and has put President Obama’s green jobs programs under the microscope. Click here to join the chat! We are joined by Heritage’s Energy and Environment Policy Analyst Nick Loris. He is taking your questions about what can really create jobs and why it is not a good policy for the government to be picking winners and losers. Submit a question in the form below and we’ll answer as many as we can! Lunch with Heritage feat. Nick Loris
You wouldn’t know it if you solely paid attention to the mainstream media, but while President Barack Obama attempts to sell the country on hundreds of billions in new stimulus spending and $1.5 trillion in new taxes, his Administration is smack in the middle of several growing scandals: the Operation Fast and Furious gun-running debacle and the crony capitalism wrongdoing involving Solyndra and LightSquared. In the fall of 2009, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), which is overseen by President Obama’s Department of Justice, launched an effort to sell …
Maybe the Department of Energy (DOE) would lend me money to buy lottery tickets. For the tickets that win, I’ll pay them back their dollar (plus $0.001 for a week’s interest). For those that lose, well, that just happens in this sort of business. They have to expect losses. That’s the argument we now hear from the Solyndra apologists: “Hey, it’s a risky business.” But venture capitalists get equity positions so that they get the big rewards when a risky venture pays off. Nobody should be making loans to high-risk …
Catching you up on clips, commentary and news of the day. Sign up for the daily email update from Scribe Obama to propose $1.5 trillion in new tax revenue – Jim Kuhnhenn, Associated Press Google Preparing for Senate Hearing – Diane Bartz, Reuters Obama’s Urgent Jobs Plan: Right Now, ‘Right Now’ means sometime next month – Andrew Malcom, LA Times U.S., European Diplomats Scramble Ahead of Palestinian U.N. Bid – Associated Press, FoxNews.com Leaders with Ginni Thomas: Tim Chapman and Michael Needham from Heritage Action – Ginni Thomas, The Daily …
President Barack Obama’s solution for America’s unemployment woes has been a stubborn campaign to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on economic “stimulus”–much of it on so-called “green jobs.” Report after report has shown the approach to be a total failure. And now, a new scandal involving Solyndra, a bankrupt solar panel company in California, should be the final nail in the coffin for the government’s meddling in the free market. “[W]e can see the positive impacts [of the stimulus] right here at Solyndra,” Obama claimed when he spoke at …
Forget entrepreneurs, captains of industry, inventors, and scientists. According to Obama Energy Secretary Steven Chu, we have the U.S. government to thank for all the wonders of technology. In a speech yesterday at Senator Harry Reid’s National Clean Energy Summit, Chu showed America his true colors–and the philosophical bent of the Department of Energy under the Obama Administration–when he delivered a speech praising government’s involvement in the growth of technologies (even helping airplanes get off the ground). In Chu’s words (which you can watch at the 30:50 mark, above): So the …
