Here’s a headline in today’s Philadelphia Inquirer: “Stimulus funds finally flowing to weatherization.” It’s the kind of headline that makes one first blink, then dumbly nod, then wonder: What were these guys thinking?
This money, along with $700 billion-plus other money, comes from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act passed nine months ago. Among this Act’s two main aims were boosting employment and making this country more energy independent. And when it comes to these two objectives, what could possible provide more immediate results than the $5 billion that was alloted in the Act to weatherization?
This isn’t high-tech stuff requiring a slow start up with uncertain outcomes. It doesn’t require complex shovel ready preparation of the sort you need for large projects. It could therefore generate good results almost immediately — if the money were provided immediately.
Weatherization is basically construction work that employs construction workers. Some of this work may involve specialized skills using monitoring equipment, but much of it is no more demanding in a skill sense than painting flat-roofed buildings white in summer to reflect heat and black in winter to absorb heat.
Construction work of this kind, as even Washington planners much have realized, is also largely seasonal. It is strongest in summer, when this stimulus money should have been flowing to keep men and women from being laid off from building new homes to work on weatherizing older structures. But the money wasn’t there in summer. It also hasn’t been there until the last weeks of fall, which means it was missing in early fall when winter weatherization could have gotten many currently unemployed people off the unemployment rolls, while also cutting into this country’s winter oil heating imports.
Why can’t the Obama economic planners get anything right? The financial end of their stimulus has bestowed on the few at the top yet more wealth without spreading it around equitably, and managed to funnel trillions of dollars directly or indirectly to banks and trading firms without getting the policy setting clout that any private provider of capital would demand and receive. And now we also see the supposed job and energy ends of the stimulus planning process allotting in a way that doesn’t even take into account the economy’s seasonal needs.
You’ve been at it for almost a year now, folks. Kindly improve your performance — promptly!