From Investor’s Business Daily:

President Obama’s green jobs agenda has become a victim of its own red tape. Several internal reports show that state-level projects have stalled for years due to federal regulations favored by labor and green groups — big boosters of the green jobs push…

This is what you get when you attempt a Big Government solution – parts of the Big Government will work against other parts of it.  Remember, it is only average Americans who want jobs…for the union officials, government bureaucrats and liberal activist groups, the agenda is quite different.  The unions, naturally, want to ensure that all the money only goes to union-approved (and thus over-priced) contractors.  Government bureaucrats want to ensure that the money only goes to contractors who donate the right way.  Liberal pressure groups – in this case, environmentalists – want to ensure that they get a cut of the pie, even if they bring nothing to the table.

The thing we can never get our liberals to understand is that government can never get it right.  Even in the areas where government is supposed to have the authority (law enforcement and national defense) the government gets it wrong.  For all the splendid people in the military and law enforcement, which of us couldn’t in five minutes search find a score of examples of corruption and incompetence in both areas?  And the people in the military and law enforcement are leavened by a those who actually have a selfless dedication to duty…for government agencies without that esprit d’corps, it becomes one gigantic mess.  Think about it – in the Army you’ll find a large number of people who will leap on a grenade to save their friends…how many people at the Department of Energy do you think would do that?  And so how many people at Energy are really willing to sacrifice their own careers in order to advance the the prosperity of those they don’t know and will never meet?

When you put government in charge of trying to make things work you are putting the job in the hands of people who are most likely to fail.  They are not spending their own money, they are not going to put their own future on the line…their prime motivation is to ensure the least amount of work for the highest amount of pay, ending up with a fat pension when they are still relatively young.  That anyone ever thought that the government could lead the way in switching us to a “green” economy demonstrates that we’ll never lack for stupidity.

Scrap it; provide tax incentives to those private enterprises who are investing in green technology and just let the natural development of the economy take it the rest of the way.  There won’t be anything in there to provide fat contracts, cushy jobs and opportunities for graft, but we’ll eventually get a green economy…