While White House claims to create jobs, government kills jobs

The news that the Environmental Protection Agency prevented early clean-up of floating oil in the Gulf by refusing to waive its “clean water” limit of 15 parts per million should make us all focus on the job killing structure in Washington, D.C. Just three days after the BP spill, the Dutch government offered their oil-skimming ships and ocean oil-cleansing technology, but were rejected because the cleaned ocean water would not reach the EPA’s limits of being 99.9985 percent pure. Imagine if even half the oil had been skimmed off; the rest probably would not have even reached shore because oil degrades quickly in warm ocean water. But because oil did reach the shore, Washington ordered a moratorium on all deep water drilling over 500 feet in the Gulf, and a moratorium on all offshore drilling in Alaska and off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. In Louisiana, the order is causing an estimated loss of tens of thousands of jobs and billions of dollars of oil production over the next two years. Blue-collar jobs on Gulf oil rigs earn an average of $60,000 per year.

An economic crisis with high unemployment is the best time to confront and even possibly reform Washington’s job-killing laws. Most Americans are either uninformed about the quantity and consequences of these laws or they regard them as normal. So now is the time to recognize, enumerate, and challenge the worst of them. But to reform bad laws, first you need to get them debated in public.

All too often we hear that cheap Chinese labor is wrecking havoc with our industries. In reality, it is a host of costly, job-killing burdens from Washington that are responsible. How many investments and job creations are not made because of compliance costs associated with excessively strict regulations (and the lawsuits they generate)? It’s no wonder that our great achievements nowadays are in fields such as electronics, movies, and games, where entrepreneurs and innovators face less government obstructions, lawsuits, and labor costs. Compare this to an investor trying to build new factories or mines.

For example, in a remote area of Alaska, efforts to start up one of the world’s richest copper and gold mines is stymied by unending Kafkaesque regulations and lawsuits. In Utah, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar arbitrarily cancelled 77 previously issued oil/gas leases because the smell produced by the drilling might affect air quality in the desert near national parks. New mining ventures today have mostly moved to Canada to avoid such unnecessary hassles.

Another prime example is nuclear electric power, which could be cheap and abundant. China is building 60 new nuclear plants over the next 10 years, while in Washington it takes 10 years to build even a single plant. Both the Chinese and the French build them in a bit over 3 years. President Barack Obama said he favored such plants and proposed billions of dollars in subsidies, but he made no mention of the obstructive permitting process that makes nuclear power so uneconomical. Remember also that nuclear energy plants are an established technology. Why does each plant have to go through such a bureaucratic rigmarole?

The EPA’s extremism and vicious fines and penalties are a primary reason why America is falling behind much of the world. Yet we hear complaints from the usual suspects that the only jobs America produces are service ones. The consequence of that view is growing trade protectionism, since we blame foreigners for “unfair” competition. This causes even more job losses: Witness the inability of Congress to ratify new trade agreements with Korea and Colombia.