23,000 jobs killed – for nothing

Occasionally, I am asked by voters in the 9th district where I stand on offshore drilling. My answer, as someone with a degree in environmental science, is that I support safe offshore drilling because we know it can be done properly, and because our economy depends on the jobs and the fuel that offshore drilling provides. The ban on offshore drilling that the administration imposed after the Gulf oil spill had no scientific basis.

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal reported: “Senior Obama administration officials concluded the federal moratorium on deepwater oil drilling would cost roughly 23,000 jobs, but went ahead with the ban because they didn’t trust the industry’s safety equipment and the government’s own inspection process.” That evidence has emerged in court documents produced by the government as it fights to defend the moratorium.

They knew that the administration’s special panel of experts had advised against a drilling moratorium; they knew that a moratorium would do nothing to stop the current environmental disaster; and they knew that it would cost 23,000 Americans their jobs in the middle of the worst economy since the Great Depression. And yet the administration did it anyway, in an attempt to score political points.

If they had put jobs first, they could have improved safety equipment and inspections over time, while keeping people at work. Instead, they put jobs last.

One of the key proposals in my economic platform is to make Congress prepare a jobs budget for each major piece of legislation. Legislators ought to know the costs of what they are about to vote on–not just in dollars and cents, but in jobs. Ultimately, however, that is not enough. Some politicians will destroy jobs anyway. That’s why it’s important, this November, to make sure we will have the right people making those decisions.