Look, I know they’re busy people, but you have to wonder if the Clintons have any sense of other people’s time:
The sun had set and the temperature had started to drop as chants of “We want Bill!” came from the back of the crowd. It had been more than two hours since former President Bill Clinton was scheduled to speak, and members of the audience looked tired.
Clinton worked in the notion of energy independence:
America can become energy independent “through homegrown clean energy and energy efficiency,” a new industry Clinton said would create 5 million jobs in the solar, wind, geothermal and biomass energy fields. Clinton said his wife would repeal subsidies to energy companies that don’t need the money and help use those savings to fund the research and technology to make cars that can get 100 miles per gallon affordable to citizens in the next few years.
It just so happens that the Beacon Hill Institute’s David Tuerck has some thoughts on job creation in North Carolina under proposed policies to address climate change:
Rigorous testing using standard economic analysis yielded far more pessimistic results than those used to support the policies, Tuerck said in an interview. “There’s an attempt to put a happy face on this legislation that’s going forward,” he said. “And the attempt is made by trying to show that implementing this legislation would create jobs and would expand economic activity in the state, rather than contract it. And the trouble with that particular representation is that it doesn’t make any sense.”
“You can’t create jobs that are good jobs — that are adding to the state economy — by shifting workers from more productive to less productive activities,” he added. “You can’t create good jobs, the kind of jobs you want to create, by increasing energy costs, by increasing the price of electricity, by imposing what amount to new taxes. This is not the way to create jobs.”
“All these claims about job creation and the like are bogus claims and unsupportable by even the most naïve sort of economic analysis,” Tuerck said.
