Medary.com

The Heritage Foundation:

Government expenditures are not free. Economists know this and most others recognize it when they take the time to think about it. Unfortunately, it seems not everybody takes that time.

In a story fit for satire in The Onion, a renewable energy research group, bankrolled by a $1.1 billion subsidy from the Department of Energy, concludes that huge government subsidies for renewable energy don’t reduce employment after all. However, their reasoning works only so long as the subsidies don’t come out of anybody’s pocket—a practical and theoretical impossibility.

Two environmentalists at the Alliance for Sustainable Energy, LLC (see ASE brag about the billion it gets from Uncle Sam, here ) on contract to the National Renewable Energy Labs authored a research paper that tries to undermine the widely circulated research from a Spanish think tank.

The Spanish research, directed by economist Gabriel Calzada, at King Juan Carlos University, analyzed the subsidized expenditure necessary to create the green jobs in Spain. It compared those funds to the private expenditure needed to support the average conventional job. Supported by other data as well, they conclude that each subsidized green job in Spain eliminated over two conventional jobs.

Emphasis mine. Hey, a two for one deal! Oh, wait, it's a one for two deal? Hmm. That's not quite gonna "save or create" a jillion jobs now, is it?

"Opportunity cost" is a really, really simple concept. It's what you can't buy when you spend money on something else. Spending wisely generally means minimizing the opportunity cost--meaning what you are spending money on is the "best and highest use" of the money you can find. Spending stupidly generally means that you are getting less for your money than the money would otherwise be worth.

Destroying two jobs to create one is a perfect example of spending money stupidly. We should not do this.

Unless your goal all along is to destroy Western industrial civilization. At some point, you have to wonder . . .