a new $15 billion plan for homes and jobs. president obama says sprucing up vacant foreclosed homes will help rebuild the job market. rich, you say it s not going to work. why not? because they re fake jobs. they re jobs that don t lead to other jobs. what we should do is create enterprise zones that jack kemp talked about, low tax, rates and so forth that incentivized business to come into these bombed out places where there have been tremendous job losses unless you see all these mortgage foreclosures. we need real economic growth and some employers who create jobs. not the government. rick, is this just another government make work program? it is so not rich. i m going to say something to you i rarely say. you are absolutely wrong. my hometown of youngstown, ho o you have seen this in action. this has really happened. they did exactly what the president has suggested here. they tore down all the urban blight. they created parks. they created commercial
these investments and there is a wealth of data that shows that some of these investments have been very wasteful. going back to natural gas, there is a lot more the government can do. great example, we should be building out infrastructure with some of our green money to be ship to go places like china where demand is skyrocketing. a big battle over that right now. the question is, which side the president will come down on. but steve, the fact is that so often behar lip service given to things like natural gas. but look where they re spending the money and it s on these battery issues that always fail, or wind mills that don t perform as they re claimed. yeah. rich made a good point about r and d, government has a role in r and d. but in terms of development, it s got to be the private sector and liquefied natural gas, the government will block a lot of those facility attention, even though some are up and ready to go. so we ve got a huge market. here and around the world. let s
export it. rick, you re against government waste. this was an incredibly was program. is this the place we should start cutting? i actually came up with a very short quote that i think speaks to this point better than i could ever hope to. so i m gog read it. federal investment in science and basic research has led to numerous innovations and commercial successes from laser lasers, from the internet to mri scanners. do you know who said that? mitt romney in his book no apology, the case for american greatness. that is the point. look, government has always been involved in our greatest progress, they re always going to be involved. all the things we count on today, government played a role in. there have always been the sad saps and the nay sayers who want to just not move forward, leave things as they are. these investments are critical. and by the way, the actual losses that we sustained in this clean energy supporting programs, 3.6% have gone wrong. that s about a third of wha
them they was, they ll be able to turn around and make a nice profit. sure. people in the private sector will do those homes a lot faster and cheaper than the government will. and the reason why youngstown is turning around is because ohio has a republican governor who is pro business. [ laughter ] all right. john, what about the specific one, $15 billion is what the president wants to spend. he says it will create jobs and you say? yeah. i m listening to rick. he resides in the scene of the world. he sees those jobs created in youngstown and says, oh, wow, look at what the government can do. but the good ideas will be starved of capital sos bad ideas can receive it in abundance. yes, they ll spend the $15 billion and jobs will be created in one area. but at what cost? what do you say to that? that s a very strange argument. in other words, it s wrong cause i ve seen it work? is that what you re saying? that makes no sense. you re looking at the observable reality. what yo
i agree with rick. the technologies that seem to be working coming out of the government come from nasa or the military. and that s what we re seeing working. of course, a lot of spaghetti taxpayer dollars thrown against the wall. the market don t want electric cars or electric battery cars. it leaves them feeling like they ll be stranded in the woods without any gas or any power to get out of the woods. it stresses them out. so we talk a lot also about nat gas, yes, it s helped by the federal government, but that was a resource that was sitting there. electric batteries had to be developed by people with a lot of taxpayer money. morgan, even folks like from the washington post, charles lane, was talking about how americans just don t want electric cars. for all the money we pour, for all the tax breaks we give to people who buy them, americans still don t want them because they deliver inferior performance at a much higher cost, like much of what the government does. yeah. so go