Speaking of green jobs; since the recession began I have heard many politicians and pundits say something along the line of "Our district will create jobs and prosperity by leading in the green business revolution"
How has that worked out? I think that our politicians are under some assumption that no other country in the world has engineers working on this problem. That China will sit idly by as we make efficient and lucrative clean energy products. The fact is that we cannot become proffitable just by changing industries, we need a climate where businesses are able to to succeed in any industry. We need less regulation, more efficient regulation (ie; less paperwork for compliance), and more efficient taxation. We also could do with a little tort reform and maybe some tarrif reform mixed in there.
If politicians (many of whom are lawyers and assume people like filling out pages and pages of EPA forms) took one minute to realise negative impact of the procedural overhead caused by all of these convoluted and redundant regulations perhaps we would have a chance at a business revolution. Many of these agencies use violations of these regulations as a revenue gathering device, this only serves to discourage business expansion and job creation.
To recap, I am not saying that we need to kill all business regulation, but we need to cut it down to the point where any person of average intelligence could understand them and reach compliance easily while still having time left in the day to run a business. Same general thought applies to tax law.