Claims by the wind industry that another year-long extension of the Production Tax Credit (PTC) would create American jobs are based on “self-serving industry interviews and unsupported wind capacity forecasts that have no credibility,” according to a study released today by the American Energy Alliance (AEA) and the National Center for Public Policy Research (NCPPR). Additionally, the report finds that the analysis conducted for the wind industry by Chicago-based Navigant Consulting significantly overestimated the number of jobs that would be lost as a result of scheduled expiration of the PTC on Dec. 31, 2012. Congress voted to extend the subsidy at a cost of over $12 billion during last year’s fiscal cliff negotiations.
The study, “Inflated Numbers; Erroneous Conclusions: The Navigant Wind Jobs Report,” was conducted by Charles Cicchetti, Ph.D, a senior advisor to the Pacific Economics Group and Navigant. The study lays bare the macroeconomic distortions and faulty modeling that the wind industry used to justify continued payments of its taxpayer-funded corporate welfare.
According to the Navigant study, the U.S. economy stood to lose 37,000 jobs in 2013 if the PTC were to have expired. Yet Dr. Cicchetti’s analysis demonstrates that Navigant misapplied models used to substantiate this claim, with the result that potential direct job losses were inflated by at least 100 percent in the key states that were reviewed. As a result, lawmakers and the general public were misled to believe that an extension of the PTC would strengthen the U.S. economy. Regarding the Navigant study, Dr. Cicchetti concludes, “The Report’s resulting job loss numbers are meaningless and should not be used to justify spending billions of dollars in taxpayer money to extend an unneeded subsidy for the wind industry.”
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