United Liberty

Remember all those jobs promised in 2008? A focal point of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign was the promise of job creation through environmental stewardship, illustrating an Obamatopia in which jobs were abundant and plentiful and the environment was unaffected by economic activity.

In a Los Angeles Times editorial published during the period of Obama’s inauguration, Marla Dickerson illustrated how Obama’s “green jobs” agenda could bring back prosperity to states like Michigan:

Whether clean energy can pull Michigan out of the ditch remains to be seen. But the push is on to retool America with so-called green-collar industries.

President-elect Barack Obama wants to spend $150 billion over the next decade to promote energy from the sun, wind and other renewable sources as well as energy conservation. Plans include raising vehicle fuel-economy standards and subsidizing consumer purchases of plug-in hybrids. Obama wants to weatherize 1 million homes annually and upgrade the nation’s creaky electrical grid. His team has talked of providing tax credits and loan guarantees to clean-energy companies.

His goals: create 5 million new jobs repowering America over 10 years; assert U.S. leadership on global climate change; and wean the U.S. from its dependence on imported petroleum.

To be fair, the goal was to create 5 million jobs over 10 years, but the situation now in states like Michigan is noteworthingly critical:

Michigan remained the state with the highest rate of unemployment at 15.1%, though that rate was down 0.2 percentage points from September. October was the 11th straight month in which Michigan posted an unemployment rate above 10%.

Unemployment is not only bad in Michigan:

In September, 23 states and Washington D.C. reported that their unemployment rates increased, and 14 states had jobless rates above the national average.

Universal health care surely must look attractive to millions of Americans when they don’t even have employment in the first place. Creating a massive new bureaucracy won’t solve that core problem, however.