More Pushback on Bay Diet Jobs Claim

A few days ago I posted about the claim being proffered by the Chesapeake Bay Foundation that the new "Bay Diet" was not going to be the great job killer it's opponents are making it out to be, but rather an enormous green jobs engine, creating a quarter million (more or less) jobs. Without being excessively nasty, and mentioning unicorn farts and other fantasies, I allowed as how I thought these claims were a bit much.  In the days that followed, the Bay News was saturated with new stories where various papers picked up and uncritically echoed the Bay Foundations claim.  Today, at last, a bit of resistance was seen, and from an unlikely source, CNN:

Can a cleaner environment create jobs?

The tactic du jour for environmentalists trying to sell a skeptical public on tighter regulations is this: spin the thing as a job creator.

Last week a Maryland-based environmental group said efforts to clean up the Chesapeake Bay would actually create 240,000 jobs over the next several years, mainly by employing people to upgrade sewage systems.

In a recent report defending stricter mercury pollution limits on power plants, the Environmental Protection Agency said 8,000 more people would be needed to build and run the pollution control equipment than would be laid off as a result of older plants shutting down.

Economists that aren't aligned with either industry or activist groups say that, when it comes to creating or destroying jobs, environmental regulations come out somewhere near neutral -- adding costs to industry but producing benefits in public health or other areas.

Which is pretty much what I pointed out, that for dollar transferred to the hands of the glazier for the broken windows (in this case representing work done no net increase in wealth), that same dollar has to be taken out of the pocket of the window owner.   I ran across a  phrase in a George Will column a few days later; "Government: The Redistributionist Behemoth", the "Law of Disbursed Costs and Concentrated Benefits."

Beyond transfer payments, redistributionist government is itself governed by the law of dispersed costs and concentrated benefits: For example, sugar import quotas confer substantial wealth on a small cohort of producers already wealthy enough to work the political levers of redistributive government. The increased cost of sugar substantially penalizes consumers as a group but not so noticeably that individuals protest.

Certainly, the costs of the Bay cleanup will be disbursed over the whole watershed, some 17 million people  (and to the extent that it's paid for by the feds, by our kids, by way of China) . So some 17 million people will be funding another quarter million.  And of those people, only a small fraction live near, or otherwise utilize the Bay. I'm one of the lucky ones that does, and even I wonder about whether the Bay cleanup as planned will be worth the costs anticipated.