There is a major national ad campaign, funded by the oil industry and
other usual suspects, to convince the public that measures to reduce
greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) and slow global warming will result in
massive job loss. This ad campaign warns of slower growth and the
loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs, possibly even millions of
jobs, if some variation of the current proposals being debated by
Congress get passed into law.
In fact, standard economic models do show that measures designed to
reduce GHG by raising energy prices will lead to some cost in terms
of slower economic growth. And slower economic growth implies fewer
jobs, although the impact will almost certainly be less than
indicated in these scare stories.
However, the oil industry's scare stories about job loss never put it
in any context. In these models, any government measure that
interferes with market outcomes almost by definition reduces
efficiency, leading to less economic growth and fewer jobs. Efforts
to slow global warming fall in this category, but so does almost
everything else, and many items in the everything else category have
a much larger impact.
For example, defense spending means that the government is pulling
away resources from the uses determined by the market and instead
using them to buy weapons and supplies and to pay for soldiers and
other military personnel. In standard economic models, defense
spending is a direct drain on the economy, reducing efficiency,
slowing growth and costing jobs.
A few years ago, the Center for Economic and Policy Research
commissioned Global Insight, one of the leading economic modeling
firms, to project the impact of a sustained increase in defense
spending equal to 1.0 percentage point of GDP. This was roughly equal
to the cost of the Iraq war.
<http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/23100>Link
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Posted By johannes to
<http://www.monochrom.at/english/2009/11/massive-defense-spending-leads-to-job.htm>monochrom
at 11/10/2009 07:24:00 PM
