Seeking more ‘make-work’ jobs

As someone who makes his living in that realm, I can emphatically assure you that 2008 has been far from a banner year in the building industry. Beginning with that loud popping sound many heard around the beginning of 2007 as the housing bubble burst (maybe it was mistaken for the champagne corks unsealed for various New Years celebrations), continuing through the subprime mortgage crisis, fueled in part by the spike in energy costs, and culminating in the near-collapse of the banking industry and tightening of credit, building activity has all but ceased in many portions of the country.

One of Barack Obama’s solutions to the problem is a program to focus on infrastructure, and it’s no surprise that every left-wing lobbying group wants to get its fingers into the pie. Certainly the United States Green Building Council was ecstatic about an Obama victory and saw his agenda as a way to get major portions of its agenda enacted:

USGBC is now working to promote sound policies in the next administration that will stimulate a green economy, create millions of green jobs, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, advance greener, more energy-efficient buildings, and spur green infrastructure.

Apparently they want to become yet another lobbying group who has bright ideas they’d like to see put into practice. However, if you look deeper into what they want to achieve, their agenda raises a few red flags. Let’s begin with “Green Buildings.”

President-Elect Obama has proposed the expansion of federal grants to assist states and localities in building more efficient public buildings through the use of LEED. In addition, under President-Elect Obama’s plan, all new federal buildings would have to be carbon-neutral by 2025. This plan also would commit all new federal buildings to a 40% improvement in efficiency within five years and would seek a 25% improvement in the efficiency of existing federal buildings within the same period.

By the language being used, there’s already a program in place for these grants – in essence the USGBC wants the federal government to put even more money that it already doesn’t have into these programs. The scratching of USGBC’s back occurs when a LEED mandate is placed on the buildings, since certification is a money-maker for the USGBC. As for the efficiency improvements, that’s all well and good if there’s a reasonable payback period on the investment. I don’t think carbon-neutrality is nearly as admirable of a goal though.

Next up is “Building Efficiency Goals and Incentives.”

President-Elect Obama has proposed a goal of carbon-neutrality for all new buildings by 2030. This will be achieved by establishing a goal of 50% greater building efficiency for new buildings and 25% greater efficiency for existing buildings over the next decade. Under the plan, the federal government would award grant funds to states and localities that implement new, energy efficient building codes, and would provide matching grants to states that promote building retrofitting through public benefits funds.

Again, more grants where the money’s not in place yet. It wouldn’t surprise me if there wasn’t eventually a cap-and-trade scam adopted on the federal level to pay for these grants. Welcome to Maryland, the canary in the coal mine for liberal lunacy – we already have adopted a similar idea.

Let’s talk about building codes, though. The idea of building codes originated out of concern for life safety, and energy efficiency was added into the mix much later. The problem with this approach is that retrofitting existing buildings will actually be discouraged, since building codes generally dictate full compliance if a change of use occurs. This also leads to the carrot-and-stick approach to lawmaking; sooner or later the grants will be turned into funds withheld for non-compliance with the items Fedzilla wants.

Next up, “Green Jobs and Job Training”:

President-Elect Obama has proposed an investment of $150 billion over 10 years to spur the development of renewable and other technologies, promote energy efficiency, and advance new fuel and smart electricity infrastructure. This plan would direct funding to the manufacturing sector for job training and transition programs, and would create an estimated 5 million new green jobs. Additional training programs, including a Green Jobs Corps for disadvantaged youth and a Clean Energy Corps, have been proposed to stimulate the development of a highly skilled workforce.

It’s not “investment”, it’s taxpayer money being taken from possible private-sector usage, confiscated from the wage-earners, passed through a layer or two of bureaucracy, and spent to reward certain industries who may or may not be heavy campaign contributors or have the ear of lobbyists. Moreover, there’s a fairly good chance that whatever the government picks out to spend funding on turns out to be an expensive boondoggle or needs further subsidization to succeed in the marketplace.

I’d also love to see what types of jobs those in the “Green Jobs Corps” and “Clean Energy Corps” are trained to do, and where they’d apply in the real world. I guess the world needs ditchdiggers, so it needs tree planters too.

Speaking of tree planting, I suppose that can work as a segue to the next part, “Transportation and Infrastructure”:

President-Elect Obama has proposed the consideration of smart growth principles in the transportation funding process, as well as renewed support for public mass transit projects. The President-Elect’s proposed plan also includes the creation of a National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank to direct $60 billion over 10 years to infrastructure projects that could create some 2 million new jobs and $35 billion annually in economic activity.

Back in September, I detailed California’s new laws in the area of transportation funding as part of the Smart Growth concept; apparently the Obama plan is to take this nationwide. Combine that with the bid to push mass transit over highway funding, and it becomes woefully apparent that Detroit’s bailout becomes a true waste of money. People aren’t going to be able to use their cars before too long, so why buy new ones?

And I can already see the infrastructure projects Obama will want: four-lane bike paths, pedestrian connectors, conversion of traffic-filled downtown streets to pedestrian plazas, and the like. There may be a bridge replacement here and there, but a disproportionate amount of the funding will surely go toward less efficient and/or less private modes of transportation, modes which will sooner or later need more subsidies.

Don’t get me wrong, I have no issue whatsoever with adopting certain building code provisions leading toward more energy-efficient buildings; perhaps it can be handled as a reward basis much like the inclusion of sprinkler systems allows a building of a particular construction type to be larger and/or have more stories. And if highway widening includes space for a bicycle path, that’s no issue for me either. (I like Maryland’s practice of widening shoulders for creating bicycle lanes because it’s safer for both driver and rider.) These and similar issues are ones that firstly should be up to individual states to adopt without federal interference and secondly need to be done in such a manner that leaves maximum flexibility to the building owner or developer.

The Obama Administration has a number of hot-button issues which must be addressed in order to improve our economy and our society in general; foremost among them on the domestic side will be straightening out the financial mess our poorly-considered lending legislation put global markets in. Instead of tightening the noose around the building industry by adding more expensive mandates to the already high cost of construction, it’s better for the near-term future that we ignore the green building lobby and work on simply getting the building industry back on its feet by loosening regulations and credit. Simply allowing market forces to return would kickstart the industry where I make my own living in a much better manner than the throwback to the inefficient and wasteful Works Progress Administration version 2.0 that Obama proposes.

Where Buchanan goes wrong

Twice a week, columnist and former Presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan posts a column to the Human Events website. Of late, Pat has railed in favor of the Big Three bailout, casting its recent failure in his latest column as a permanent blow to Republicans because they’ll forever lose the votes of the Reagan Democrats who work at these auto plants.

While Pat makes a good point about the subsidies that several Southern states have provided to get various auto plants within their borders, the cost of these pale in comparison to the amount of money the Big Three would receive from the federal government. Moreover, there’s no guarantee that the Big Three wouldn’t have to file for bankruptcy and close anyway should the “car czar” installed as part of the bailout proposal not decide that their business plan is meeting whatever specifications are dictated to the automakers as a condition for survival.

Buchanan is known as a protectionist conservative, who supports the idea of tariffs on imports in order to save American jobs. He notes:

In today’s world, America faces nationalistic trade rivals who manipulate currencies, employ nontariff barriers, subsidize their manufacturers, rebate value-added taxes on exports to us and impose value-added taxes on imports from us, all to capture our markets and kill our great companies. And we have a Republican Party blissfully ignorant that we live in a world of us or them. It doesn’t even know who “us” is.

While there are definitely inequities in how we open our markets to others as opposed to how they open their markets to us, on the whole the trade situation benefits consumers in America. (This isn’t to say some improvements couldn’t be made.) And while Pat decries the “Toyota Republicans” who voted against the bailout, it’s worth noting that many of these Reagan Democrats abandoned the GOP two cycles ago because the party was straying from fiscally conservative principles!

The Republicans had a poor choice in the matter – either alienate those who work and depend on the Big Three (and make up a significant percentage of voters in Rust Belt states) or go against their principles and support a bailout that wasn’t guaranteed to work without significant concessions from many of those same voters. And it’s doubtful that the GOP would get any credit for attempting to save their jobs in the auto plants via the union missives these workers receive, but I’m certain the Republicans would be assigned the blame for making the unions concede wages and benefits for workers and retirees.

There’s no question that one or more of the Big Three would file for bankruptcy in 2009 without some sort of federal help, but this could be a liberating factor as well. Perhaps a merger is in order between two or even all three of Detroit’s automakers – certainly it wouldn’t create a monopoly because the Big Three’s market share has declined to a point where foreign automakers are closing in on the lion’s share of the American market.

In this case, the conservative Buchanan advocates for the wrong choice. Certainly many Republicans set a poor precedent by voting to bail out the financial industry, but one wrong move does not deserve another and it’s time for Detroit to catch up to the marketplace.