Auto Bailouts, Green Jobs, and Anti-Terrorism Costs

Auto Bailouts

Obama is speaking at a Chrysler plant today praising the auto bailouts.

Director of the Center for Investors and Entrepreneurs John Berlau points out that the bailout of GM and government favoritism toward United Auto Workers have raised the cost of capital for other U.S. businesses.

“In fact, as a whole, the auto rescue may result in net job losses, both because of the likely increase in the cost of capital from bondholder treatment, and because of the rapid shutdown of auto dealers that has cost tens of thousands of jobs. Some dealers would have and should have been closed in a normal bankruptcy, but the special inspector general for TARP (SIGTARP) found in a report that the extraordinarily ‘rapid pace’ of dealer closings resulted in ‘tens of thousands of dealership jobs [that] were immediately put in jeopardy.'”

Green Jobs

Though the Obama Administration continues to tout “green jobs,” Americans who have been trained for green jobs are having trouble finding work.

Senior Counsel Hans Bader points out that stimulus funds slated to subsidize a green industry at home mostly went to foreign firms.

“The $800 billion stimulus package is shipping American jobs overseas. More than 79 percent of ‘green jobs’ funding under the stimulus package went to foreign firms. Meanwhile, to pay for the stimulus package, the government borrowed a huge amount of money from the American people, money that would otherwise have been spent on American products, or been invested in America’s companies. The stimulus package has also destroyed thousands of jobs in America’s export sector by triggering trade wars that America effectively lost. It also subsidized countless examples of government waste and corruption.

Anti-Terrorism Costs

As frequent flyers complain about new TSA procedures, TSA officials claim travelers’ discomfort is merely the price of real security.

CEI President Fred Smith argues that the cost of anti-terrorism measures are out of control.

“America’s response to 9/11 created far more costs than the attack itself. We as a society have failed to distinguish between healthy defenses and paranoid bureaucratic responses. HSA and its sub-agency, TSA, are but two examples. As many have noted, on 9/11 some horrible individuals did terrible things to America; on 9/12, our politicians took over! The costs – both direct and indirect – of such bureaucratic anti-terrorist policies are massive. And now the TSA has embarked on a massive new campaign to force air travelers to submit to either electronic nude-searches or the equally intrusive pat downs. The outrage from this move may allow us to reevaluate our whole approach to achieving a safer world.”