Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
This story is from the “you can’t make this stuff up” file. Some of our British cousins have figured out a way to solve it all. They have set up the One Million Jobs Caravan, as part of a “Campaign Against Climate Change” … I’m not sure how they plan to stop the climate from changing, but apparently it takes a million people to do it. To fight against CO2 emissions, the backers plan to get into fossil-fueled vehicles and drive, the lot of them, from city to city all around England and Scotland. And then back again.
Now, the numbers out of Spain have shown that for every green job created, two regular jobs were destroyed. And the “green jobs” campaign in the US has been a resounding failure. So I was quite curious as to just how these green jobs were going to be created. I also wondered about the involvement of the trade unions called the CWU, the UCU, and the like.
I found out the campaign backers were proposing to create the jobs the old-fashioned way …
… I cannot improve on their own words …
… the mind boggles … the solution to the UK economic crisis, and the way to end the persistent nuisance of the climate inconsiderately changing all the time, is to add a million “secure, flexible, permanent” union workers building wind farms to the UK government’s permanent welfare rolls.
These folks would be funny if they weren’t so dangerous.
Meanwhile, here in California we just found out that we’re unexpectedly $16,000,000,000 dollars in the hole in this year’s budget, from things like paying union teachers and state bureaucrats and functionaries princely salaries while they are working and then paying them very large pensions for the rest of their lives. Oh, and did I mention business-unfriendly? Eighth year in a row, California was voted worst state to do business in by a poll of CEOs …
However, I hear that there is budgetary hope regarding the California Department of Transportation, which maintains the roads. It seems that they’ve invented a machine that can idly lean on a shovel, promising big savings in labor costs, which is good news … bad news is, I hear the machines have already formed the MWU, the Machine Workers Union, and they’ve stopped leaning on their shovels and joined the One Million Jobs Caravan …
w.
Correction to my post, I slipped a zero.
The 4th para should read:
“Accordingly, this proposed plan would if implemented at best reduce unemployment figures by about 50,000 to 80,000”
Omar Khayyam (via Edward Fitzgerald) had it right:
One Moment in Annihilation’s Waste,
One Moment, of the Well of Life to taste—
The Stars are setting and the Caravan
Starts for the Dawn of Nothing—Oh, make haste!
Unfortunately we have no politician in the UK who will treat these people with the disdain they deserve. ‘The environment’ is now treated like ‘race’ and other sensitive issues. If you demur or disagree on any aspect, you are an evil capitalist/colonialist/racist, and with a PR man as Prime Minister, he ain’t gonna have the cojones to tell them they’re idiots. Don’t forget, even before he was elected, Cameron did the hug-a-huskie schtick in the Arctic, as if showing his green side made him a nice person, the twerp.
Me thinks this would not go down well with the “occupational health and safety” people. You can’t have a million people climbing more than 3 rungs of a ladder above ground without accreditation.
Bill Tuttle says:
May 15, 2012 at 3:31 am
You know, we are very different on either side of the Atlantic.
I thought my comment was incredibly right-wing as it values people for their work (contribution) not their right to be who they feel like (the compassion that lets them live off welfare).
You saw that compassion (that I do value) as being in opposition to the contribution and as a drip-drip-drip ratchet to the left.
I’m not certain who is right but it is interesting to me that we can have such different perspectives on economics yet similar views on the climate science.
I guess science is more empirical and economics more ideologoical.
“This is just another example of how education has failed – ultterly and completely – to teach young people about how economies really work. It’s frightening these people get to vote”
It also failed to teach bankers about how economies work, along with other things they failed to learn such as the legal definition of fraud.
Live on benefits in the UK ?
Not legally. the only way to live on benefits is to work as well, then benefits make useful pocket money. Nobody lives on UK£70.00/wk, which is the unemployment benefit rate…all other benefits are paid to the recipient, like property tax and rent…paid to the council and landlord.
Uk badly off ?
Really….lets see…the treasury printed money to give to the bank off England…which then guaranteed the money to the banks….who didn’t lend it to anyone, just used it to bolster their balance sheet (while claiming tax relief on the losses they had made)….so the government debt is owed to…..the government.
Maybe people should look at the state benefits paid to those with oodles of money….loads of tax relief flying around everywhere…..loads of government subsidy paid to those with enough political clout, who then subsidise the political parties…..a subsidy and benefit roundabout…
Better defined as a benefit and subsidy gravy train…..everyones a passenger.
But there are a multitude of ways to create the illusion of wealth.
And I think your numbers are seriously on the low side both for numbers of government employees and their cost.
grow it – less than 2% employed here
manufacture it – about 12%
mine it – probably wouldn’t even make significant digit.
Ho Hum…
And now you know why the teachers introduced “New Math” in the 70’s.
Robert of Ottawa says:
May 15, 2012 at 3:05 am
“One million treadmills will both create energy and one million jobs.”
I like how you think.
And to keep their energy up, they could eat yogurt made from all that milk that would otherwise be poured down the sink. Also, to improve working conditions, they could drink the corn biofuel instead of using it for cars.
Maybe they are on to something afterall ;o)
loved the comment “These fossil hating, welfare loving folks with make believe gov jobs would be funny if they weren’t so dangerous.( Nothing more secure than welfare in the UK, my mothers sister and husband made a 3 generation art form out of it)”
I find the story truly upsetting. The arrogance is breathtaking. So they want everybody’s money, they want my money, and they also know that they can do a better job with my money than I ever could. They want to take my money, by force, through tax, and waste it, until they run out, and come back for more. Nice try.
This bunch has morality worse than a thug, because thugs don’t pretend to know better, or to be better than you are.
Sad, sad, sad…..
Apologies for not including the link
Those whose sole income and accumulated wealth is derived from tax revenues cannot be net contributors to tax revenues.
State employees could carry ID which allowed them to purchase goods tax free. In addition, they could be excused contributing to National Insurance and Income tax. They would simply be paid sufficiently less so that their spending would buy as much a before. But that would look unfair and make it seem that they don’t pay their share. They don’t and they can’t.
I have sympathy for everyone who has lost jobs.We should not have raised vat to 20 per cent prices are constantly going up and not just on fuel,we should not waste money on trying to tackle climate change though.
I couldn’t help but notice the hard hats.
In their world, all you need to be a worker is “hard hats”.
And yet, they do all they can to get rid of the jobs which really need to wear them.
These people are pretentious, patronising, stupid, bourgeois prats.
And I thought we had it bad in Oz. At least now I feel even better about moving here, despite the lying [self-snip] we have as a prime-minister.
Merovign Misunderstands my post. I am not supporting socialism but science, do the calculations, not knee jerk responses even if in jest. Wllis usually does a good job of that. Then i put forward some ideas for wider consideration in the scientific context, what is the fight really about.
Gail, made a good stab at it, The Banking monopoly of Money and how it operates is what people see or perceive as capitalism and what we all suffer, control and ownership vested in few interlocked mega corporations. Thus my referred choice of “free markets”.. Why do you think that they are so in bed with the Watermelons?
No takers on the market thoughts.
Are these folks from Dorset perchance???
It was about a generation ago that I heard the phrase “You won’t buy Japanese cars with British haircuts”. Some things don’t seem to change.
Perhaps this time round they expect to all become Environment Correspondents for the BBC?
The really worrying thing is….. these people are SERIOUS…!
Willis Eschenbach says:
May 14, 2012 at 6:42 pm
These folks have never learned the most basic rule of economics. There are only three ways to create wealth—mine it, grow it, or manufacture it.
========
Modern banking has invented another. Increase the speed of money. As money moves faster and faster electronically, the same dollar passes from hand to hand many times in a day, until it beomes a blur, giving the illusion that we are all holding the same dollar. As you add more and more dollars, it gives the illusion we are wealthy.
A truck full of council workers arrived at a job site and found they had forgotten to bring shovels. The union foreman phoned the engineers back at base and explained. The engineer said he’d send out 20 new shovels. The union leader said “What will the workers do while they wait?”
“Well”, said the engineer, “I guess they’ll just have to lean on each other.”
Most people have trouble figuring out why it now takes both parents working to support a family, where a generation ago it only took one. Here is the scam that was pulled on working families:
1. Create a “cost of living index”, that measure how much prices go up each year.
2. Condition people to limit wage increases to the “cost of living index”.
So, now if the cost of living goes up say 3% in a year, people will be expected to ask for 3% increase in wages so they can pay their bills.
However, what most peple fail to take into account is that margin tax rates – the tax rate you pay on the final dollar you receive in a year – are close to 50% for middle class working families. So, when you get a 3% cost of living increase, the government takes the first 1.5% as taxes, and the remaining 1.5% goes to the wage earner.
Thus, each year, as the cost of living increases, and you get your raise (if you are lucky) to match the cost of living, you are actually falling behind quickly due to the effects of marginal tax rates. Over time your one salary will not be able to support the same family that your parents could support with only one parent working, and your spouse will have to join the work force for you to be able to maintain the family.
This is the hidden effect of taxes you never hear about. Why both parents need to work in today’s economy just to stay even, where only a generation ago it took just one parent working.
Surely an out and out joke.
No-one could possibly be that silly and incapable of logical thought processes and still be able to function.
My 1st blog “How we slashed household heating & hot water energy use by 73.5% & CO2 by 24%” http://t.co/RyTeRgQA #heatpump #solar
Once again this blog risks crossing the line into the political. I admire WUWT for usually pegging their views on climate science to hard facts and not framing the whole thing in the left- vs- right dichotomy which plagues the debate, skews the science.
Writers on here often dispair of leftist/liberals defaulting to a pro position on AGW – however here you are explicitly aligning yourself with a small statist agenda which undermines your ‘above politics’ credentials. Can you please halt with the economic commentary! This is not your sphere, just as climate science is not krugmans.
I say this not because I think the million jobs lot are anything but idiots ( excuse the triple negative), but you are straying into economic arguments here about the merits and demerits of the state ‘creating’ jobs. As someone with some knowledge of international political economy, and a european, I can tell you it will will you no friends over here to lecture us, from a nation which is growing, on wether or not the state can boost aggregate demand through artificial job creation. They called it New Deal in your country once – though admittedly they had more sense than to build windfarms with it.