A Home Builder Who Uses Only American Made Supplies

$19.3 Billion only created 3,500 jobs

by Carol D. Leonnig
and Steven Mufson

A $38.6 billion loan guarantee program that the Obama administration promised would create or save 65,000 jobs has created just a few thousand jobs two years after it began, government records show.

The program — designed to jump-start the nation’s clean technology industry by giving energy companies access to low-cost, government-backed loans — has directly created 3,545 new, permanent jobs after giving out almost half the allocated amount, according to Energy Department tallies.

President Obama has made “green jobs” a showcase of his recovery plan, vowing to foster new jobs, new technologies and more competitive American industries. But the loan guarantee program came under scrutiny Wednesday from Republicans and Democrats at a House oversight committee hearing about the collapse of Solyndra, a solar-panel maker whose closure could leave taxpayers on the hook for as much as $527 million.

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Geithner: We Must Tax Small Businesses to Protect Big Gov

EPA Admits Jobs Don't Matter

FL Considers Forcing Jobless to Work for Unemployment Checks

by Stephen Clark

With more than 1.1 million people out of work in Florida, one state lawmaker wants to make them volunteer in order to collect unemployment benefits.

Republican State Rep. Kathleen Passidomo has introduced a bill that would require the jobless to volunteer at a nonprofit for at least four hours each week.

"This may be a way to energize people to find a job," Passidomo told FoxNews.com. She said the idea came from her 87-year-old father, a retired physician who volunteers at a senior health clinic. He noticed that when there's an opening at the clinic, volunteers are the first to be hired, she said.

"So my thought was this is an opportunity – a win-win for everyone," she said. It gets the unemployed "out of the house, gets them involved in a community project. So this would be a way for the unemployed people to give back. And what that could do is create a relationship. A lot of executive directors at nonprofits are knowledgeable about what's going on."

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A Critique Of The "Fox News Viewers Are Misinformed" Study

Liberals' 50 Years of Dreadful Domestic Policy

by Larry Elder

For the past 50 years, the Democrats -- and many Republicans who should know better -- have been wrong about virtually every major domestic policy issue. Let's review some of them:

Taxes.

The bipartisan extension of the Bush tax cuts represents the latest triumph over the "soak the rich because trickledown doesn't work" leftists.

President Ronald Reagan sharply reduced the top marginal tax rates from 70 percent to 28 percent, doubling the Treasury's tax revenue. President George H.W. Bush raised the income tax rate, as did his successor. But President George W. Bush lowered them to the current 35 percent.

President Barack Obama repeatedly called the current rate unfair, harmful to the country and a reward to those who "didn't need" the cuts and "didn't ask for" them. If true, he and his party ditched their moral obligation to oppose the extension. But they didn't, because none of it is true. Democratic icon John F. Kennedy, who reduced the top marginal rate from more than 90 percent to 70 percent, said, "A rising tide lifts all the boats." He was right -- and most of the Democratic Party knows it.

Welfare for the "underclass."

When President Lyndon Johnson launched his "War on Poverty," the poverty rate was trending down. When he offered money and benefits to unmarried women, the rate started flat-lining. Women married the government, allowing men to abandon their moral and financial responsibilities.

The percentage of children born outside of marriage -- to young, disproportionately uneducated and disproportionately brown and black women -- exploded. In 1996, over the objections of many on the left, welfare was reformed. Time limits were imposed, and women no longer received additional benefits if they had more children. The welfare rolls declined. Ten years later, The New York Times wrote: "When the 1996 law was passed ... liberal advocacy groups ... predicted that it would increase child poverty, hunger and homelessness. The predictions were not fulfilled."

Education.

The federal government's increasing involvement with education -- what is properly a state and local function -- has been costly and ineffective at best, and counterproductive at worst. Title I, a program begun 45 years ago to close the performance gap between urban and suburban schools, burns through more than $15 billion a year, and the performance gap has widened. The feds spend $80 billion a year on K-12 education, as if money is the answer. States like Utah and Iowa spend much less money per student compared with districts like those in New York City and Washington, D.C., with much better results.

Where parents have choices -- where the money follows the student rather than the other way around -- the students perform better, with higher parental satisfaction. But the teachers' unions and the Democratic Party continue to resist true competition among public, private and parochial schools.

Gun control.

Violent crime occurs disproportionately in urban areas -- where Democrats in charge impose the most draconian gun control laws.

Over the objection of those who warn of a "return to the Wild West," 34 states passed laws allowing citizens to carry concealed weapons. Not one state has repealed its law. Professor John Lott, author of "More Guns, Less Crime," says: "There is a strong negative relationship between the number of law-abiding citizens with permits and the crime rate: As more people obtain permits, there is a greater decline in violent crime rates. For each additional year that a concealed handgun law is in effect, the murder rate declines by 3 percent, rape by 2 percent and robberies by over 2 percent."

"Affirmative action."

Race-based preferences have been a disaster for college admissions. Students admitted with lesser credentials are more likely to drop out. Had their credentials matched their schools, they would have been far more likely to graduate and thus enter the job market at a more productive level.

Preferences in government hiring and contracting have led to widespread, costly and morale-draining "reverse discrimination" lawsuits. Where preferences have been put to the ballot, voters -- even in liberal states like California -- have voted against them.

Minimum wage hikes.

Almost all economists agree that minimum wage laws contribute to unemployment among the low-skilled -- the very group the "compassionate party" claims to care about.

Economist Walter Williams, 74, in his new autobiography, "Up from the Projects," describes the many low-skilled jobs he took as a teenager. "By today's standards," he wrote, "my youthful employment opportunities might be seen as extraordinary. That was not the case in the 1940s and 1950s. In fact, as I've reported in some of my research, teenage unemployment among blacks was slightly lower than among whites, and black teens were more active in the labor force as well. All of my classmates, friends, and acquaintances who wanted to work found jobs of one sort or another."

ObamaCare.

This ghastly government-directed scheme will inevitably lead to rationing and lower-quality care -- all without "bending the cost curve" down as Obama promised.

Any party can have a bad half-century. Merry Christmas.

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Obama was a job creator from day one

Government Unions vs. Taxpayers

by Tim Pawlenty

When Americans think of organized labor, they might think of images like I saw growing up in a blue-collar meatpacking town: hard hats, work boots, tough conditions and gritty jobs. While I didn't work in the slaughterhouses, I did become a union member when I worked at a grocery store to help put myself through school. I was grateful for the paycheck and proud of the work I did.

The rise of the labor movement in the early 20th century was a triumph for America's working class. In an era of deep economic anxiety, unions stood up for hard-working but vulnerable families, protecting them from physical and economic exploitation.

Much has changed. The majority of union members today no longer work in construction, manufacturing or "strong back" jobs. They work for government, which, thanks to President Obama, has become the only booming "industry" left in our economy. Since January 2008 the private sector has lost nearly eight million jobs while local, state and federal governments added 590,000.

Federal employees receive an average of $123,049 annually in pay and benefits, twice the average of the private sector. And across the country, at every level of government, the pattern is the same: Unionized public employees are making more money, receiving more generous benefits, and enjoying greater job security than the working families forced to pay for it with ever-higher taxes, deficits and debt.

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The jobs Obama hates

by Ben Lieberman

For all his talk of job creation, President Obama has targeted many occupations for extinction. Using unelected bureaucrats to implement a host of job-killing measures, his administration is generating piles of pink slips:

Oil: Even before the BP spill, Obama's Interior Department had cracked down on domestic drilling. In 2009, regulators allowed less than $1 billion in new oil and natural gas leases on federally controlled areas -- both onshore and offshore -- compared to $10 billion under President George W. Bush the year before.

Factories: Rising regulatory burdens, energy prices and health-care costs -- Obama has left no stone unturned in making American manufacturing globally less competitive and in forcing jobs overseas.

Mines: The decades-long regulatory squeeze on minerals mining continues unabated, and the Obama administration has now added coal mining to the hit list. The attack includes global-warming regulations that seek to restrict demand for coal and also direct attempts to stop new coal mines from opening.

Fishing: Obama's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is imposing strict fishing limits, even where there is little or no evidence of an overfishing problem. Its controversial catch-shares program is destroying jobs in such fishing communities as Gloucester and New Bedford in Massachusetts, both of which are challenging the program's legality in federal court.

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Consumerism Is Keynesianism

by Steven Horwitz

One of the most pernicious and widespread economic fallacies is the belief that consumption is the key to a healthy economy. We hear this idea all the time in the popular press and casual conversation, particularly during economic downturns. People say things like, “Well, if folks would just start buying things again, the economy would pick up” or “If we could only get more money in the hands of consumers, we’d get out of this recession.” This belief in the power of consumption is also what has guided much of economic policy in the last couple of years, with its endless stream of stimulus packages.

This belief is an inheritance of misguided Keynesian thinking. Production, not consumption, is the source of wealth. If we want a healthy economy, we need to create the conditions under which producers can get on with the process of creating wealth for others to consume, and under which households and firms can engage in the saving necessary to finance that production.

Historically it was Keynesianism that brought the emphasis on consumption into economics.  Before the Keynesian revolution the standard belief among economists was that production was the source of demand and that encouraging saving and production was the way to generate economic growth.  This was more or less the correct understanding of Say’s Law of Markets.

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States Raise Payroll Taxes to Repay Loans

by Sara Murray

State governments are borrowing heavily from the federal government to keep paying unemployment-insurance benefits and, even with the weak job market, most states are raising payroll taxes to pay off the loans.

Thirty one states, their unemployment-insurance funds empty, have borrowed nearly $41 billion from the federal government. California alone has borrowed nearly $8.8 billion as of mid-November, according to the Labor Department.

As states try to replenish the funds and begin to repay the loans, employers are facing increases in both state and federal payroll taxes, a potential barrier to new hiring.

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Uncertainty = Business Freeze = No Investment, No Jobs

Donald Trump: I’d love a trade war with China!

Obama Calls India Creator, Not Poacher, of US Jobs

by Scott Baker

MUMBAI, India (AP) — Searching for help half a world away, President Barack Obama on Saturday embraced India as the next jobs-creating giant for hurting Americans, not a cheap-labor rival that outsources opportunity from the United States.

Fresh off a political trouncing at home, Obama was determined to show tangible, economic results on his long Asia trip, and that was apparent from almost the moment he set foot on a steamy afternoon in the world’s largest democracy. By the end of the first of his three days in India, he was promoting $10 billion in trade deals — completed in time for his visit — that the White House says will create about 54,000 jobs at home.

That’s a modest gain compared with the extent of the enduring jobless crisis in the United States. Economists say it would require on the level of 300,000 new jobs a month to put a real dent in an unemployment rate stuck near 10 percent.

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Right to work = economic growth

by Dr. Greg Schneider

California Congressman Brad Sherman (D) has introduced legislation to repeal right-to-work laws in the twenty-two states that have them, including Kansas. Right-to-work laws were created in 1947 as part of the Taft-Hartley Act, which amended the National Labor Relations Act of 1935. “Right-to-work” refers to the right of states to prohibit closed shops, a workplace that requires a worker to be a member of a labor union and to pay dues to that union.

Workers can form unions in right-to-work states but individual workers have the right to opt out and not pay dues. In states without right-to-work laws, unions can force employers to fire any worker who does not pay dues.

Let’s look at some facts from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. From 1999 to 2009, right-to-work states have added 1.5 million private sector jobs for a 3.7 percent increase; states which are not right-to-work lost 1.8 million jobs over the same decade, for a decline of 2.3 percent. Some states, like Michigan and Ohio, home of the powerful United Auto Workers Union, have hemorrhaged private sector jobs, declining 17 percent and 10 percent respectively over that time period.

Is this what Congressman Sherman wants to see in the rest of the country? The facts clearly show that jobs in right-to-work states are growing, not declining and some of those jobs are union jobs. Congressman Sherman’s bill to repeal right-to-work laws is aimed only at protecting unions, not at allowing Americans the right to work.

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Make Mine Freedom (1948)

Obama Slammed For Shovel Ready Admission

Dick Blumenthal Stumped On How To Create A Job