By Max Schulz

No way of describing Van Jones—the environmental- and racial-justice activist tapped last week to be President Obama’s chief advisor on green jobs—is nearly as effective as letting his own words do the talking. A sampling of his recent offerings from interviews, profiles, and news stories:

There is a moral principle to green the ghetto first, to give young people the chance to put down that handgun and pick up a caulking gun.

The green economy is not just for the Ph.D., but also for the Ph.-do.

There’s a direct relationship between environmental racism and the lack of sustainability of society as a whole.

It’s not that we have a President who’s black; it’s that for the first time we have a President who’s green.

The change has got to be top down, bottom up, and inside out. The federal government has to get off the bench. Or frankly the federal government has to put down its pompoms for the polluters and put on the cleats and get on the side of our team trying to solve this problem.

Green dollars work overtime, they work double-time, they work triple-time.

We dream of rust-belt cities blossoming as Silicon Valleys of green capital. We imagine Solution Centers, training young urban workers in new technologies and ancient wisdom. . . . We imagine formerly incarcerated people moving from jail cells to solar cells—helping to harvest the sun, heal the land and repair their own souls.

If there’s a twenty-first-century heir to Jesse Jackson—who rose to prominence in the 1970s and eighties with an oratory of urban uplift that included slogans like “hope, not dope”—then Van Jones is it. The 40-year-old professional community activist has rocketed to fame by melding racial grievance and claims of economic injustice with the increasingly faddish orthodoxy of environmentalism. His glibness and comfort in front of a camera expose a sound-bite unseriousness, an inner-city hustle with a green patina. The Van Jones who spouts “from jail cells to solar cells” is merely Jackson version 2.0, eco-upgraded for the Great Warming.

Starting his new job today—Special Advisor for Green Jobs, Enterprise, and Innovation at the White House Council on Environmental Quality—Jones is probably the person most associated with the concept of green jobs. (That includes even his new boss, Barack Obama, who pledged during last year’s campaign to create 5 million of them somehow.) Jones has been tasked to coordinate green-jobs policy as part of Obama’s bid to transform America’s fossil-fuel-heavy energy economy, and his work is cut out for him. Not that it should be difficult to create scores of green jobs: Congress and the administration are working hand-in-glove to formulate policies that subsidize renewable-energy technologies and fuels, mandate their use in our energy mix, and punish fossil-fuel usage. Strip away the novel green veneer, and the promise of job creation differs little from New Deal–era make-work efforts. Just as government can pay people to dig ditches needlessly, it can pay them to install solar panels, even if the free market wouldn’t. That may be job creation, but it’s a lot closer to welfare than to free enterprise.

But will all this subsidized activity succeed in transforming our energy economy? For that matter, will it do anything meaningful to fix inner-city problems like poverty, crime, illegitimacy, and drugs, as Jones says it will? The evidence suggests that it won’t. Wind, solar, and other so-called renewable-energy sources play negligible roles in our energy economy because they fail in competition with oil, coal, natural gas, and nuclear power. Those sources account for the lion’s share of our energy needs, not because of government favoritism or conspiracy by avaricious corporate powers, but because they provide large amounts of energy reliably and at attractive prices. Renewables don’t come close to doing either of those things. Government-directed job-training efforts, similarly, have nearly always failed to impart useful skills to disadvantaged workers (though they have succeeded spectacularly in wasting taxpayers’ dollars).

Jones has long been able to sidestep the woeful economic realities of renewable energy by saying that because of the threat posed by global warming, we simply can’t afford not to go whole hog in the green direction. But now the onus will be on him to provide results. Green employment will almost certainly surge under his watch, but how the economy will fare when government forces costly energy technologies and a tax on carbon emissions on it is a much more doubtful proposition.

In a New Yorker profile last year, Jones revealed that while in college he changed his name from Anthony, which he considered dull. He picked “Van” for his new moniker, he said, because “it has a little touch of nobility. But at the same time it’s not overboard.” It’s a telling anecdote, revealing the mindset of someone seemingly concerned more with marketing and self-promotion than with substance. Today Jones begins work that involves, one would think, a lot more than branding and selling. But can he deliver anything more than sound bites?

Max Schulz is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

By Michael G. Franc

(B)(i) If the Secretary of Labor finds that the State law provisions (disregarding any State law provisions which are not then currently in effect as permanent law or which are subject to discontinuation) meet the requirements of paragraph (2) or (3), as the case may be, the Secretary of Labor shall thereupon make a certification to that effect to the Secretary of the Treasury, together with a certification as to the amount of the incentive payment to be transferred to the State account pursuant to that finding.

— American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, Division B, Title II, Section 2003 (emphasis added)

This arcane provision appears about three-quarters of the way through the new stimulus law. It is part of the title that doles out $7 billion in additional unemployment insurance (UI) benefits. The italicized portion has sparked an intense debate over whether the nation’s 50 governors should accept this new funding. With some federal giveaways, the question doesn’t arise: Why turn down free money? But in this case, “free” money could end up costing a lot.

Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal started the firestorm last week when he announced that Louisiana would reject its share of the new unemployment-insurance funding. His rationale: The parenthetical phrase would require the Pelican State to (1) jettison longstanding policies about who can and cannot receive UI benefits and (2) increase the payroll-tax burden on employers.

Jindal’s reservations elicited catcalls from befuddled big-government governors as well as one of his own state’s senators, Democrat Mary Landrieu. But when other conservative governors echoed Jindal’s concerns, a gubernatorial tea party seemed in the offing.

On Sunday’s Meet the Press, Jindal explained his rejection of the bill’s UI funds this way:

The $100 million we turned down was temporary federal dollars that would require us to change our unemployment laws. That would’ve actually raised taxes on Louisiana businesses. We as a state would’ve been responsible for paying for those benefits after the federal money disappeared.

Jindal went on to echo former president Reagan by adding:

So many of these things that are called temporary programs end up being permanent government programs. But this one’s crystal clear, black and white letter law. The federal stimulus bill says it has to be a permanent change in state law if you take this state money. And so within three years the federal money’s gone, we’ve got now a permanent change in our laws, we have to pay for it, our businesses pay for it. I don’t think it makes sense to be raising taxes on Louisiana businesses during these economically challenging times.

It makes no sense, he concluded, “for us to take temporary federal dollars and create permanent state obligations.”

A neighboring governor, Mississippi’s Haley Barbour, detailed what the federal strings tied to these funds would mean to his state. He characterized the conditions as “welfare state 3.0” in a February 6 interview with CNBC’s Chris Matthews:

MATTHEWS: [W]hat about . . . your House speaker down there? He says you need the money. He can’t — he says he’s incredulous . . . that you would stand against getting this money in the coffers of the state treasury.

BARBOUR: . . . Well, this bill, according to the advocates for the bill, would let Mississippi have $54 million of additional money for unemployment. The only problem is, when you read the details, we get $3.9 million of that for what we do now. And to get the other $50 million, we have to expand unemployment to let people collect unemployment that have never been eligible in our — in our state, including people who aren’t willing to take a full-time job.

Now, there’s way too much of that in this bill, social policy, to the point it — it’s kind of welfare state 3.0.

MATTHEWS: What do you mean by — I thought you had to be able to — when you go to unemployment, you go down to the desk, you tell them what you can do, and they find a job for you. You are saying that that’s not a requirement under this new system?

BARBOUR: That’s right. In Mississippi today, if . . . you’re unemployed, we try to help you find a job. Until you can find a job, get offered a job, we pay you unemployment. But you have to be willing to accept a full-time job in order to be paid unemployment.

This law, this bill, the stimulus package, would change that, and would require Mississippi, to get this $50 million, to change our law.

Now, Chris, that means that, in a year-and-a-half or two years, when the federal money runs out, however long it is, then my employers are about to get a $10 million or $15 million tax increase to give unemployment to people that Mississippi doesn’t think you should give unemployment to, but is going to be crammed down our throat by Washington.

MATTHEWS: So, this extra spurt of money, this stimulus money that would be coming down to Jackson, Mississippi, for Mississippi and the other states, you are saying it’s going to bring with it the federal hold on you guys, tell you how to do certain things that the government in Washington doesn’t do now?

BARBOUR: What I’m saying is, we need to be very careful to make sure we understand what strings are attached.

MATTHEWS: Yes.

The “federal hold” to which Matthews refers is actually several provisions taken directly from a separate bill authored by liberal Rep. Jim McDermott (D., Wash.). His Unemployment Insurance Modernization Act is an undisguised effort to force states to loosen dramatically their eligibility requirements for unemployment insurance (UI) payments in exchange for more federal cash. States, for example, would have to agree to make UI benefits available to individuals:

• who leave their jobs for a “compelling family reason,” including (undefined) illnesses or disabilities of immediate family members or moving to “a place from which it is impractical . . . to commute” because a spouse accepts a new job; and
• who seek only part-time work (most states require recipients to look for full-time positions) or refuse to pursue job leads because they are enrolled in job-training programs (most states bar this practice).

Unemployment-insurance systems vary widely from state to state and reflect the differing cultural mores that prevail across the country. Some states place a high priority on personal responsibility and work effort, and maintain systems that make benefits harder to obtain; others simply want to compensate unemployed workers for being unemployed, with no questions asked. The stimulus bill is the latest example of Washington using its seemingly unlimited resources to cram dependency-inducing and work-discouraging requirements down the throats of states whose leaders place a much higher value on work and personal responsibility.

Go for it, Bobby, Haley, and any other courageous governors who dare stand up to imperial Washington.

For the last 35 years, educators and analysts at The Heritage Foundation have been intimately involved in the nation’s great public policy debates. In all that time, we have never encountered legislation with such far-reaching and revolutionary policy implications as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act currently before Congress. And never have we seen a bill more cloaked in secrecy or more withdrawn from open public exposure and honest debate.

In addition to being the single most expensive bill ever proposed, this measure calls for a massive expansion of the federal government’s reach into the day-to-day life of virtually every citizen, business and civic organization in the nation. That, in itself, should be the subject of an extensive public conversation and thoughtful debate. Instead, we have seen Congressional leaders schedule snap votes on a 1,434-page bill that no one—repeat, no one—has had a chance to read in its entirety, much less digest and deliberate.

This bill has been advertised as an economic stimulus bill—despite the fact that the Congressional Budget Office estimates it will actually weaken our nation’s long-term economic growth. While the stimulative utility of the bill is, at best, questionable, it would unquestionably rewrite the social contract between the American people and their government. For example:

• The bill reverses the bipartisan and highly successful welfare reforms of 1996 and drastically expands the welfare state. For instance, it will start rewarding states for adding people to their welfare rolls, rather than for helping them find gainful employment. And contrary to long-established practice, it will entitle able-bodied adults without children to receive cash assistance.
• It does extreme violence to the concept of federalism—bailing out states that have spent irresponsibly at the expense of taxpayers in states that have been fiscally prudent.
• It greatly shifts the responsibility and power over health care delivery and decision making from individuals to government. Among other things, it would create a new federal health board to decide which medical services are “effective” in America, paving the way for government effectively to overrule the clinical decisions of private physicians.
• It deliberately censors religious speech and worship on school campuses by prohibiting use of any “stimulus” funds for facilities that are used for sectarian instruction, religious worship, or a school of divinity.

The list goes on. These and similar provisions will mean fundamental changes in our society. In many instances, the bill would establish policies that directly challenge widely held American values.

We are appalled that Congress is even contemplating such profound changes with so little openness and due diligence. In the past, major policy changes in our welfare system, or health care, or trade policies, etc., were always, quite properly, preceded by extensive public conversation and full debate. That is how a democracy should make important decisions.

The failure of Congress and the Administration to allow that debate is damaging to our democracy. Both chambers of Congress suspended their budget rules to push it along. And both the President and the leaders of the House and Senate have violated their solemn promises that the bill would be available for several days of public review prior to voting, so that the American people might have a chance to learn what is in the bill and to make their views known to their elected officials.

This reckless approach to governance can only undermine public faith in our elected officials and our government as a whole. We call on Congress and the Administration to live up to their promises and stated ideals, and give the democratic process a chance to work.

Ed Feulner is president of The Heritage Foundation.

A major public policy success, welfare reform in the mid-1990s led to a dramatic reduction in welfare dependency and child poverty. This successful reform, however is now in jeopardy: Little-noted provisions in the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate stimulus bills actually abolish this historic reform. In addition, the stimulus bills will add nearly $800 billion in new means-tested welfare spending over the next decade. This new spending amounts to around $22,500 for every poor person in the U.S. The cost of the new welfare spending amounts, on average, to over $10,000 for each family paying income tax.

Ending Welfare Reform

The welfare reform of 1996 replaced the old Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) with a new program named Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF). The key to welfare reform’s reduction in dependency was the change in the funding structure of AFDC.

Under the old AFDC program, states were given more federal funds if their welfare caseloads were increased, and funds were cut whenever the state caseload fell. This structure created a strong incentive for states to swell the welfare rolls. Prior to reform, one child in seven was receiving AFDC benefits.

When welfare reform replaced the old AFDC system with TANF, this perverse financial incentive to increase dependence was eliminated. Each state was given a flat funding level that did not vary whether the state increased or decreased its caseload. In addition, states were given the goal of reducing welfare dependence (or at least of requiring welfare recipients to prepare for employment).

The House and Senate stimulus bills will overturn the fiscal foundation of welfare reform and restore an AFDC-style funding system. For the first time since 1996, the federal government would begin paying states bonuses to increase their welfare caseloads. Indeed, the new welfare system created by the stimulus bills is actually worse than the old AFDC program because it rewards the states more heavily to increase their caseloads. Under the stimulus bills, the federal government will pay 80 percent of cost for each new family that a state enrolls in welfare; this matching rate is far higher than it was under AFDC.

It is clear that–in both the House and Senate stimulus bills–the original goal of helping families move employment and self-sufficiency and off long-term dependence on government assistance has instead been replaced with the perverse incentive of adding more families to the welfare rolls. The House bill provides $4 billion per year to reward states to increase their TANF caseloads; the Senate bill follows the same policy but allocates less money.

Unnecessary Changes

Proponents of the stimulus plan might argue that these changes are necessary to help TANF weather the current recession. This is not true. Under existing TANF law, the federal government operates a TANF “contingency fund” with nearly $2 billion in funding that can be quickly funneled to states that have rising unemployment. It should be noted that the existing contingency fund ties increased financial support to states to the objective external factor of unemployment; it specifically avoids a policy of funding states for increased welfare caseloads, recognizing the perverse incentives this could entail.

If the authors of the stimulus bills merely wanted to provide states with more TANF funds in the current recession, they could have increased funding in the existing contingency fund. But they deliberately did not do this. Instead, they completely overturned the fiscal and policy foundations of welfare reform.

Writing in Slate, liberal commentator Mickey Kaus criticizes the stimulus bill welfare provisions as a “liberal conspiracy to expand the welfare rolls.” He laments, “Why use the aid specifically to encourage expansion of welfare? … At the very least the extra aid to the states shouldn’t be triggered by caseload expansion. (You could, for example, give states aid in proportion to their local unemployment rate.)” These are reasonable suggestions; the authors of the stimulus bills pursued a different policy precisely because they wish to overturn welfare reform and increase dependence on government.

Welfare Spendathon

But overturning welfare reform is just the beginning. In his recent press conference, President Obama explained that the stimulus bill would provide “tax relief” and “direct investment” in infrastructure. He neglected to mention that of the $816 billion in new spending and tax cuts in the House stimulus bill–32 percent or $264 billion–is new means-tested welfare spending, providing cash, food, housing, and medical care to poor and low income Americans. (The figure in the Senate bill is about 15 percent lower.)

In the first year after enactment of the stimulus bill, federal welfare spending will explode upward by more than 20 percent, rising from $491 billion in FY 2008 to $601 billion in FY 2009. This one-year explosion in welfare spending would be, by far, the largest in U.S. history. But spending will continue to rise even further in future years. The stimulus bill is a welfare spendathon, a massive down payment on Obama’s promise to “spread the wealth.”

Hidden Welfare Spending

While $264 billion in new welfare spending may seem like a lot, it is only the tip of the iceberg. If the stimulus bill is enacted the real long-term increase will be far higher. This is because the stimulus bill pretends that most of its welfare benefit increases will lapse after two years. In fact, both Congress and President Obama intend for most of these increases to become permanent. The claim that Congress is temporarily increasing welfare spending for Keynesian purposes (to spark the economy by boosting consumer spending) is a red herring. The real goal is a permanent expansion of the welfare system.

The House and Senate bills contain a half dozen or more new welfare entitlements or expansions to benefits in existing programs. The pretense that these welfare expansions will lapse after two years is a political gimmick designed to hide their true cost from the taxpayer. If these welfare expansions are made permanent–as history indicates they will–the welfare cost of the stimulus will rise another $523 billion over 10 years.

Once the hidden welfare spending in the bill is counted, the total 10-year cost of welfare increases will not be $264 billion but $787 billion. This new spending will amount to around $22,500 for every poor person in the U.S. The cost amounts, on average, to over $10,000 for each family paying income tax in the U.S.

The overall 10-year fiscal burden of the bill (added to the national debt) will not be $814 billion but $1.34 trillion. To this figure must be added the interest on the debt issues to finance this spending deluge.

A Trojan Horse

Both the Senate and House stimulus bills are Trojan horses that deliberately exploit anxiety about the current recession to conceal their destruction of the foundation of welfare reform and a massive expansion of the welfare system. Since its enactment in the mid-1990s, such reform has proven to be a very successful policy that dramatically reduced welfare dependency and child poverty. The fact that the stimulus proponents seek to conceal the bill’s massive permanent changes in welfare is a clear indication that they understand how unpopular these changes would be if the public became aware of them. Far from an exercise in “unprecedented transparency”–as President Obama claims–the stimulus bills are an example of unprecedented deception.

Robert Rector is Senior Research Fellow in the Domestic Policy Studies Department and Katherine Bradley is a Research Fellow in the DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society, at The Heritage Foundation.

Committees of the US Congress have recently been discussing the cutting or elimination of certain federal spending programs. From beginning to end, the discussion seems to be centering on whether the programs are effective and aimed at a worthwhile goal. There seems to be little or no discussion of whether the programs are in the legitimate province of the federal government, as defined by the enumerated powers of the US Constitution. This is exactly backwards from the proper procedure. Yes, we need effective legislation aimed at worthwhile goals; but it is most important that all legislation stay within the limits set by the Constitution. The fact that a thing is worth doing does not mean that the federal government has or should have the lawful power to do it.

When Davy Crockett was a US Representative from Tennessee, he had an experience that drove this principle home for him. One day, while lounging on the Capitol steps with some other Congressmen, they saw a fire raging in Georgetown. Crockett and the others rode to the fire and worked to get it under control (imagine that happening now, if you can). When the fire was out, a number of people had been left homeless. The next morning, on the House floor, a bill appropriating $20,000 to relieve the victims of the fire was rushed through on a recorded vote. Crockett voted in favor of the bill.

The next summer, when he was up for re-election, Colonel Crockett went back to his home district to do some campaigning. People seemed happy enough with him, until he ran into a man named Horatio Bunce, a well-respected resident of the district. Mr. Bunce told Davy in no uncertain terms that he could not vote for him again. He accused the Congressman of not having the capacity to understand the Constitution, citing the $20,000 appropriation as evidence.

Noting that giving charity is not one of the powers of Congress enumerated in the Constitution, Mr. Bunce told Davy, “…while you are contributing to relieve one, you are drawing it from thousands who are even worse off than he…If you have the right to give to one, you have the right to give to all; and, as the Constitution neither defines charity nor stipulates the amount, you are at liberty to give to any and everything which you may believe, or profess to believe, is a charity, and to any amount you may think proper. You will very easily perceive what a wide door this would open for fraud and corruption and favoritism, on the one hand, and for robbing the people on the other. No, Colonel, Congress has no right to give charity. Individual members may give as much of their own money as they please, but they have no right to touch a dollar of the public money for that purpose.”

Thoroughly convinced, Davy incorporated Mr. Bunce’s arguments, and a confession of his own wrongdoing, into his campaign speeches. Re-elected without opposition, Crockett returned to Washington with a far better understanding of his duty to uphold the Constitution. When the opportunity came to vote on a relief bill for the widow of a naval officer, he offered in his speech to donate one week’s salary to her cause, but not to vote public funds for it. The House followed his lead in voting down the appropriation, but not a single other member contributed any of his own money (though they had been ready enough to contribute that of the taxpayers).

Oh, for a silver tongue like that of Horatio Bunce! To be able to convince citizens and Congressmen alike to respect the Constitution and the founding principles of our nation. Crockett’s biographer, Edward S. Ellis, passed on this story in his book, “The Life of Colonel David Crockett.”