Free-Market Green Jobs for $2.63 a Day

[Geee]

American Thinker:

I employ the services of a landscape maintenance company (AKA a gardener) to maintain my yard. The very existence of his business depends on the collection of that $80 from me ($2.63 a day) as well as the 30 or 40 other people whom he provides his services to each month. This type of service may seem like an unnecessary "luxury" to many but it's a mutually beneficial transaction that forms just one of the small but vital cogs in the wheel of capitalism.

With the downturn (think death-spiral) of the economy in California, my wife and I have had to make many sacrifices in order to keep our own household on a sustainable path. While brainstorming ways to save money, the idea of letting our gardener go and doing the yard maintenance work ourselves has come up several times. But we always come back to the idea that we need to resist succumbing to this recession and do our part in helping to keep what's left of this fragile economy alive. Fortunately for him, and us, we've been able to continue to utilize his services -- for now.

How many other s-corp "rich" individuals, just like us, are out there who would be unable to maintain a service such as this if more of our money ended up being extracted through higher tax rates? If our taxes were to increase by even a small amount (like, say, $80 per month), our gardener would unfortunately end up being one of the first casualties (although I might have to reconsider if he started whistling Disney tunes like the Solyndra robots).

President Obama also said: "This is not class warfare; it is math." Okay, let's do some simple math. Let's look at what could have been done with the $535 million in taxpayer dollars that Obama "invested" in just that one Solyndra deal alone. If you were to take the salary of one gardener who has 45 clients at $80 each per month, his earnings would add up to 3,600 per month, or $43,200 per year. This means that if the $535 million that was carelessly wasted on the Solyndra deal had been left in the hands of the taxpayers, it theoretically could have been used to pay the annual salary of about 12,384 gardeners. How does that stack up to the 1,100 who just lost their jobs at the luxurious Solyndra plants that built solar panels for twice the amount that they were able to sell them for?

[RandyM]

Wonder if his gardener is a legal US resident?