President Barack Obama used an event near Milwaukee to tout his clean energy agenda and the jobs created by the stimulus package early in his administration.
But there’s still a ton of work to be done to get the economy back on track, as a new survey of homebuilders out today shows. Homebuilders are more down in the dumps than they have been since the depths of the Great Recession, March 2009.
Little wonder they’re so far down, since there’s a huge backlog of foreclosed homes on the market, and consumers facing a 9.5 percent unemployment rate and five workers for every open job aren’t exactly in a big-spending mood.
As for clean energy, a cornerstone of job creation Obama promised during the 2008 election, it’s largely on hold, thanks to dysfunction and fecklessness by both parties in the U.S. Senate. A bill that should have been passed to put a price on greenhouse gas emissions from burning coal, oil and natural gas would have created the funding to create the infrastructure needed for all those clean energy jobs and set a price that made clean energy competitive with fossil fuel.
But the Senate punted. The president can talk all he wants, but without a cost on carbon, and massive investment, we’ll be waiting a long time for those jobs of the future.
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