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Posted on 08/06/2013 12:02:16 AM PDT by neverdem
The president constructs another lie on behalf of government greed.
Last week President Obama solidified his growing opposition to the Keystone Pipeline by asserting that the long-delayed project would only be producing “about 2,000 construction jobs and maybe 150 permanent jobs.”
Think about that a minute. The section of the pipeline that remains to be built from Alberta to Steele City, Nebraska is 835 miles long. Does President Obama really think this monumental edifice is going to be built by 2-1/2 construction workers per mile? Compare that to the fifteen employees of the Department of Public Works — half of them sipping coffee — who take three weeks to repair 100 yards of pavement on the local highway.
Construction of the Trans-Alaskan Pipeline, which is almost exactly the same length, employed tens of thousands of construction workers. The population of Valdez alone, the southern terminus, increased by 7,000 in the three years it took to do the job.
The current arguments over how to build out the nation’s infrastructure and put people back to work have long gone far past the point of absurdity. It really has nothing to do with what kind of energy we’re going to use, what facilities will be built or where they will be located.
The whole tug-of-war is whether the job will be done by government or private enterprise. President Obama is wedded to the idea that nothing can be of any promise or value unless it is done by the government. Listen to the litany of job descriptions that comes with his promises to “restore the middle class.” It’s always teachers, firemen, first responders, bridge and road repairs performed by state and local governments employing unionized employees under the Davis-Bacon Act — government employees all. If a Canadian company wants to come south...
(Excerpt) Read more at spectator.org ...
Company officials have said the pipeline will bring about 4,000 construction and full-time jobs to the area and boost local communities’ tax revenue.
There are two categories of jobs...long-term and short-term. In the real world....either gain is generally appreciated. I would agree....long-term, this project probably only amounted to a hundred jobs. Short-term for two years? By the time you add in support people....maybe 20,000 jobs.
On the positive side....Canada will build a pipeline to the east coast and some Americans will go up and take those jobs for a year while it’s being built. And no, they won’t pay US taxes on that income.
Much of the steel, and construction equipment would be made in the USA too.
If the whole pipeline could be created by a single robot that cost 30 bucks then that would mean that it was a better idea, not a worse one.
Conversely - if the pipeline required the entire population of the US to construct it then it would almost certainly not be worth building.
Normal folks call this LYING!
I read some where the other day that if Peace was signed with Iran and the pipeline was built that oil prices would drop by 1/2. This is not good for Obama’s alternative energy.
If the pipeline was built, I can say that here north of Houston we would grow even faster here than we already are in Montgomery County.
Texas Stretch of Keystone XL Pipeline Progressing
snip
TransCanada says that the pipeline helps national security, because if the northern segment is built it will bring oil from Canada, a friendly neighbor. Also, it is creating jobs. More than 4,000 people are currently working on the pipeline, Goulet said. However, many of those jobs are for constructing it. Once complete, Goulet estimated that it would bring 20 to 30 permanent TransCanada jobs to Texas, though that does not count other companies providing services along the route.
end snip
Yours is the most important post on this thread. It also answers questions raised in the article itself.
Obama & Harry Reid heavily supported a CHINESE company building a solar farm near Henderson, Nevada.
They couldn’t talk enough about all the ‘construction’ jobs it would provide.
The permanent jobs numbered less than 30. Last I heard, the Chinese company pulled the plug on this project—after getting preferential treatment & land use changes from the Obama administration.
Interesting — and quite credible. The watermelons aren’t just opposed to the pipeline — they’re mainly out to stop the product that would flow in it. You’ve identified one of their main fears.
If the price of oil dropped by half, the USA would save about $1/4 trillion a year on foreign oil. American consumers would save nearly $1/2 trillion a year. Every year. That would be like a perpetual economic stimulus program — only, this one wouldn’t leave you circling the drain in a debt spiral. You wouldn’t be quibbling over how many thousands of jobs were created — you’d be gloating over how many millions of jobs were created. That’s scarey stuff for watermelons.
You make a very good point about how “jobs created” is a poor a measure of the economic merits of a project, such as the pipeline. Indeed, as efficiency goes up (a good thing, in economics terms), the number of workers required to do the task declines. Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, there has been a lot of hand-wringing about automation killing jobs (can you say “Luddite”?); but, we’ve continually adjusted. Meanwhile, our standard of living has risen beyond the wildest imagination of anyone living 200 years ago. It seems that the more we have, the more we want — and that’s kept us busy. Or, more accurately, it’s kept us as busy as we want to be — the work week has dropped by nearly half, in those years. Another good thing.
The talk of “jobs created” won’t go away any time soon. It’s the populist’s way of discussing economic growth. Meanwhile, the best we can do is prevent the other side from getting away with outright lying about the numbers.
Odumbo is protecting his pals in Saudi Arabia by NOT approving the Keystone pipe. We all know that No. America has more oil than the Saudi’s and that the Keystone pipeline will put a major hurt on the Saudi oil exports. He (odumbo) has stonewalled this project since day one and IMO, will never allow it to be built on “his watch”. How can one person be allowed to control the our nations economy like this? He has done more harm, and continues to do so, to America than ANYONE I can recall in my almost 76 years. He has got to be removed and soon.
If they can't keep traditional energy costs high, their allegedly green alternatives will never even come close to being economically feasible, no matter how they cook the books.
The unintended consequence of this, though, is that we are making strides toward energy self-sufficiency as traditional sources are developed because there is money to be made on proven and reliable energy sources, unlike the neophyte green energy sources which cannot compete in most applications.
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