I was watching an old David Letterman with Bill Clinton, from 2010, and Clinton was talking about rather obvious policy measures that he claimed would have huge benefits. A lot of this has been talked about before in other venues, of course, but looking back from the benefit of six years I’d be interested in talking about why these goals haven’t been met:
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Clinton said that green energy creates more jobs than fossil fuels, and that the stimulus spends a lot on green energy development. Six years later, I understand that there are more jobs in traditional fossil fuels than in green energy, but that’s not a fair comparison, since we still use mostly fossil fuels. What is the “bang for the buck” in green energy vs. fossil fuels, as of right now? For example, does $1 million in sales of solar cells or windmills generate more jobs than $1 million of oil or coal sold?
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Clinton said the stimulus would put us ahead of much of the rest of the world in development of green energy. Did this pan out at all?
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Clinton said that fixing buildings to make the more energy efficient pays for itself and provides tons of jobs. He did not specifically reference the stimulus on this point, but I do remember talk that the stimulus did have some money for making existing buildings more energy efficient. How much has been done in the last six years? And if it does indeed pay for itself, why isn’t every private sector company with sufficient capital doing it? Or is it being done as we speak, it’s just not the kind of thing that makes headlines?
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On jobs(which were obviously a big problem in 2010), Clinton cited the skills mismatch theory of joblessness. He claimed that the unemployment rate could be cut by nearly half if only we just trained Americans for the jobs that were open. That sounds really simple, but hasn’t the federal government had multiple job training programs for decades? Were any new ones created in the last eight years? Is there any data on how successful government job training has been?