President Obama's regulations have killed off a lot of jobs, and now we have Hillary Clinton's promise that she will continue this noble tradition (as an editorial in the New York Post describes her vow):
We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business,” Clinton said Sunday night while boasting about her clean-energy program — and with a big smile on her face.
In fact, this is standard Democratic policy: President Obama’s been throwing coal miners out of work for seven years now, aiming to deliver on his 2008 pledge to “bankrupt” the coal industry.
But most Dems have the sense to pretend they’re just protecting the environment — and bashing business, ’natch.
Fine, Clinton quickly followed with a vow to dole out $30 billion for job retraining and to cover early-retirement costs for the workers she’ll get fired.
First off, job training is a cliche beloved of people who don't really have a solution for anything. It's right up there with solving the deficit by ending waste, fraud, and abuse. Second, coal miners already have jobs. It makes no sense to eliminate economically viable jobs and replace them with job training. And green jobs? The Post points out that most green jobs "exist exclusively in liberal rhetoric."
And as the New York Post editors also observe, while coal is not the perfect fuel (nothing is), the coal industry has already invested billions in making coal cleaner. This Democratic Party's anti-coal crusade is a betrayal of an industry that has a good record on race relations–the United Mine Workers barred racial discrimination in the nineteenth century.
It is also a betrayal of a culture and people liberals look down on. I know "How Green Was My Valley," about the upright Morgan family of miners, is set in Wales, but it is still a movie every progressive who mindlessly wants to eliminate these jobs should see.