Barack Obama will bring his green jobs message to hard-hit Ohio today. The president will push government-funded green jobs to the depressed communities. These jobs aren’t cheap. The Center for American Progress estimated that federal outlays of $100 billion over a two year period would create two million green jobs, or roughly one new position for every $50,000 spent by taxpayers. But that’s never stopped Obama before. Why should it stop him now?
The AP reported:
President Barack Obama is telling voters in Ohio, already wracked by high unemployment, that investments in clean-energy technologies will help boost the nation’s economy.
Obama planned to use his visit Friday to test-drive an aggressive populist push on jobs, a top concern for voters across the country as the White House begins a message shift heading into fall elections expected to be difficult for Democrats.
Obama was meeting with voters in the northeast part of Ohio, where steel mills have given way to rust. Statewide, unemployment stands at 10.6 percent.
A town hall session was on Obama’s public schedule at Lorain County Community College, near Cleveland. He was last in the county ahead of the state’s March 2008 presidential primary, when he delivered a speech on the economy at a drywall factory that closed two months later.
Obama was expected to note such challenges as he spends a day in the state that delivered him a victory in his 2008 campaign but is shaping up to be a tough haul heading into elections for an open Senate seat and the governor’s office as well as the House delegation.
Officials are tinkering with a revamped Obama message in the face of a potentially disastrous political shift that, on Tuesday, elected Massachusetts Republican state Sen. Scott Brown to the U.S. Senate in a seat long occupied by the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy.
Obama looked to Ohio to reset his record with a campaign-style day, complete with a tour of a wind turbine plant and visits with local leaders. He also sought to harness the energy of the campaign trail that he mastered during a two-year campaign for president.
Obama will likely omit the fact that for every new job sustained by subsidized renewable energy at least 2.2 are lost in other industries.
And, let’s hope the wind turbines are less expensive than the solar panels he’s promoted that will take 110 years to pay for themselves.
