Buisnessweek reported this morning that the Bureau of Labor Statistics is ending its green jobs data collection program thanks to the $85 billion in automatic spending cuts that began to kick in today. The conservative twitter jokes about how this is just another sign of #sequestergeddon pretty much write themselves.
But while there was plenty about the BLS green job data that was suspect (160,000 green jobs in the “school and employee bus transportation” sector alone) they did provide a steady measure of green job growth to hold Democrats accountable with.
Remember President Obama’s promise to create 5 million green jobs? Well BLS’s first green jobs data set showed 3.129 million green jobs in the entire country for 2010. But the BLS final estimate foe green jobs in 2011 was just 3.138 million. So over the course of an entire year, the Obama economy created just 9,000 green jobs.
To put that in perspective, the entire U.S. economy created 2.1 million jobs over that same time frame. Instead of being a driver of economic growth as Obama promised, green jobs turned out to be a half a percent rounding error. In fact,according to the BLS, the number of green jobs actually fell in Texas between 2010 and 2011 while the state created 209,000 overall.
It is not worth hiking taxes over, but as long as Democrats are still pushing their green jobs fantasies, it would have been nice to keep the BLS green jobs data set around.
