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With more than 22 million Americans either unemployed (14 million) or working part-time and unable to find full-time employment (8.5 million), there is nothing more important economically right now than job creation. We'll hear from President Obama tonight about his new $300 billion plan for promoting job growth through a combination of tax cuts, direct aid to state and local governments, and infrastructure spending. It's not clear yet how many new jobs will actually be created for $300 billion, but it will probably be a disappointingly low number. Even if 1 million new jobs were created, which is unrealistically optimistic, it would come at a cost of $300,000 per new job created"“not such a good deal.
What if we could create a million new shovel-ready jobs in the United States over the next seven years, and then add another 400,000 new jobs to the economy by 2030, and do it without spending a dollar of taxpayer money? In fact, what if the creation of those new jobs actually generated hundreds of billions of dollars of government revenue: $36 billion by 2015 and $800 billion by 2030. Sound too good to be true?
According to a new study by Scotland-based Wood Mackenzie Energy Consulting (sponsored by the American Petroleum Institute), those are the estimates of new job creation and increased government revenues that would result from: a) opening access in key regions of the United States to oil and natural gas development that are currently off-limits, b) returning existing U.S. regions (e.g., onshore U.S., the Gulf of Mexico, and Alaska) to their historical levels of oil and gas development, and c) opening the Keystone XL pipeline and other new Canada-to-U.S. oil pipelines.
The blue shaded area in the chart above shows graphically the net job gains through 2030 from increased domestic production of oil and gas compared to maintaining the current projected levels of domestic energy development. Here’s one way to understand the impact of that level of additional employment on the U.S. economy: If we had 1 million of those oil and gas jobs today, it would lower the U.S. jobless rate from 9.1 percent down to 8.4 percent, and if we had all 1.4 million jobs, it would lower the rate down almost a full percentage point to 8.2 percent.
When you can add a million or more jobs to the U.S. economy by opening America's own vast energy resources, and at the same time generate hundreds of billions of revenue and also increase our energy security as an additional benefit, I think you’ve got a jobs package that will dominate anything that we’ll hear about tonight.
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