Local Commentary

COMMENTARY

October 21

There’s nothing workable about Obama’s Jobs Act COMMENTARY William A. Levinson

ALBERT EINSTEIN reputedly defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results.

President Barack Obama already has added hundreds of billions of dollars to our national debt with his first stimulus package: $8,000 handouts to first-time homebuyers and $7,500 tax credits toward the Chevy Volt. His administration also dumped half a billion dollars of taxpayers’ money into the black hole known as Solyndra. Now he wants Congress to allocate even more money our country does not have to reinforce his string of failures.

Mr. Obama’s inclusion of school construction in his American Jobs Act makes as much sense as investment in the horse-drawn carriage industry while the first Model T Fords began to roll off a moving assembly line. Performing arts such as theater, band and orchestra, along with team sports and shop classes, are about the only education-related activities that now require the physical presence of students, teachers and/or coaches. Everything else can be taught over the Internet, which eliminates not merely the capital cost but the overhead of everything but the gym, auditorium, music practice rooms, workshops and athletic fields.

Internet schools also eliminate the cost of school buses and their fuel, along with the travel time of students and teachers. The money the teacher saves on fuel is effectively a direct after-tax addition to his or her salary, and the time he once spent commuting is now his as well. Travel-restricting weather, of course, becomes irrelevant with the new technology, which also can save time and money for businesses and professional societies. There are no “snow days” on the Internet.

Meanwhile, the American jobs waiting under the ground in Pennsylvania are the real thing as opposed to an “act,” because there is a genuine economic and national need for them. An entry-level hourly mining job pays twice the wage as a job in retail or warehousing, and the same goes for the chemical industry jobs that turn the coal into gasoline. The latter technology has been around since the 1920s, and Germany used it to fuel its war machines after the Allies strangled its oil supplies during World War II. The process breaks even with oil when the latter is between $30 and $50 a barrel; it is currently more than $70 a barrel, while demand can only increase as nations such as China and India industrialize.

The United States does not need what the Obama administration calls “jobs” in failed green-energy ventures that were never economically viable, or in trading carbon credits as advocated by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (“Cap and Trade Could be a Boon to New York,” Wall Street Journal, Oct. 21, 2009). The United States needs a coal-mining counterpart of the giant steel worker Joe Magarac – a giant miner whose swift kick with a steel-toed work shoe can propel his oil-rich Middle Eastern counterpart back from where he came.

The central obstacle to this common-sense objective is the Obama administration’s push for carbon taxes or cap-and-trade mandates, including backdoor carbon dioxide regulation by the Environmental Protection Agency. This agenda has little to do with genuine environmental protection and everything to do with special interests that have bundled millions of dollars in campaign contributions for Mr. Obama.

The best way to create the high-wage jobs and achieve energy independence is to remove Mr. Obama and his fellow cap-and-trade supporter Sen. Bob Casey in November 2012, or even sooner in the Democratic Party’s primary.

William A. Levinson, of Wilkes-Barre, is the author of “Henry Ford’s Lean Vision: Enduring Principles from the First Ford Motor Plant” and other books on quality, management and industrial productivity.

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