On the campaign trail in 2008, Barack Obama promised to create 5 million green jobs across the nation. Depending on how you define green jobs, he either did incredibly badly on this front — helping to create less  than 3,000 jobs — or quite badly — adding about 700,000 jobs after the passage of the 2009 stimulus.

But there’s a gigantic problem with the latter estimate: It counts all mass-transit and construction jobs as being green because the industries follow green principles. So bus drivers and ditch diggers are green employees.

As you probably suspected, the group that put out the report had a motive to put its thumb on the scale. It’s from the Environmental and Energy Study Institute,  “a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to promoting environmentally sustainable societies.”

On the campaign trail in 2010, Jerry Brown promised to create 500,000 green jobs in California. A year later, The New York Times scoffed at his vow.

In the Bay Area as in much of the country, the green economy is not proving to be the job-creation engine that many politicians envisioned. … Gov. Jerry Brown promised 500,000 clean-technology jobs statewide by the end of the decade. But the results so far suggest such numbers are a pipe dream….

The Economic Development Department in California reports that $59 million in state, federal and private money dedicated to green jobs training and apprenticeship has led to only 719 job placements — the equivalent of an $82,000 subsidy for each one.

In early 2013, California greens celebrated a report that said the Golden State led the nation in creation of green jobs in 2012 with 26,000. But that figure once again included categories of jobs like mass transit and construction — no surprise since the report didn’t come from a respected think tank but from Environmental Entrepreneurs, a de facto lobbying front for government-subsidized green projects.

And what do the think tanks say? The Brookings Institution, considered liberal to moderate, echoed McKinsey’s findings in its 2011 report, estimating that green jobs constitute about 2 percent of the total economy — and that too was with a definition that included many construction jobs. A twist to the Brookings report: It found there were fewer green jobs in Silicon Valley in 2010 than 2003.

So when the new leader of the California Senate talks up green jobs, he’s going down a well-trod path. If his promises come true, that will be a first.

As The New York Times noted in 2011, it’s just wrong to depict green jobs as emerging as a central pillar of the U.S. economy.

But it is a talking point that remains beloved among greens, if not among economists.

But in California, Covered California enjoyed the usual upbeat happy talk in its media coverage. The San Francisco Chronicle is a good example:

“A last-minute surge of Californians trying to sign up for health insurance before Monday’s midnight deadline slowed down the state’s enrollment website and lengthened wait times for people who called the agency’s toll-free number for help.

“More than 155,000 people signed up for coverage under the Affordable Care Act from March 24 through 2 a.m. Monday, pushing total enrollment in the state health exchange past 1.2 million Californians.”

In the Chronicle’s lengthy article, it never even mentioned such basic distinctions as how many people had paid their premiums versus merely “enrolling.” Nor did it try to determine how many of the sign-ups would be subsidized by taxpayers and how many were paying full price. This angle is absolutely crucial to the long-term viability of Covered California.

Why isn’t this stuff covered? My assumption after 24 years as a California journalist is that it’s a mix of bias, peer pressure and incompetence.

ACA mostly insuring the previously insured

For properly skeptical coverage of the Affordable Care Act, nobody’s done better than former Wall Street analyst Avik Roy. Here’s  part of what he posted Monday on Forbes.com:

“Today is March 31, 2014: in theory, the last day you can sign up for coverage under the subsidized Obamacare insurance exchanges. If you’ve been a regular reader of this space, you know that the numbers routinely paraded by the Obama administration regarding Obamacare website sign-ups don’t tell us much about the actual number of uninsured individuals who have gained coverage. A new study from the RAND Corporation indicates that only one-third of exchange sign-ups were previously uninsured. …

“The RAND report appears to corroborate the work of other surveys. Earlier this month, McKinsey reported that 27 percent of those signing up for coverage on the individual market were previously uninsured.

“One important finding of the McKinsey survey was that the proportion of those who had formally enrolled in coverage, by paying their first month’s premium, was considerably lower among the previously uninsured, relative to the previously insured. 86 percent of those who were previously insured who had ‘selected a marketplace plan’ on the exchanges had paid, whereas only 53 percent of the previously uninsured had. …

“What’s important to remember is that this is not how Obamacare was supposed to work. The Congressional Budget Office, in its original estimates, predicted that the vast majority of the people eligible for subsidies on the exchanges would be previously uninsured individuals.

“Instead, the vast majority are previously insured people, many of whom are getting a better deal on the exchanges because they either qualify for subsidies, or because they’re older individuals who benefit from the law’s steep rate hikes on the young.”

So while we don’t know what’s going on in California, nationally, the overwhelming number of people who are actually paid enrollees in the federal exchanges are people who had to get new policies because of Obamacare — not people who were previously uninsured.

You know, the folks who are the core central focus of Obamacare.

Maybe eventually the San Francisco Chronicle will get around to reporting on this angle in California.

Does Timm bother to consider the possibility that this is sequester theater — another attempt by the Obama administration to make tiny cuts in overall federal spending hurt to build pressure on Congress to raise taxes? Does he consider the angle that the Army Corps could have made cuts elsewhere?

Nah. He’s got his glib, easy thesis and he’s sticking to it. Meanwhile, the Hill newspaper offers insight into why an agency that has a budget that has gone up may struggle to pay for things it used to handle:

“President Obama proposed a one percent pay increase for federal workers and military employees in a pair of letters to Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) sent Friday afternoon. …

“In a statement earlier this year, House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) said Obama’s push for a pay increase was ‘not necessary to retain talented employees and just wastes taxpayer money.’

“’Federal employees have continued to receive promotions and within-grade pay increases over the past few years of the supposed ‘pay freeze,’ and voluntary separations from the federal government are near all-time lows,’ Issa said.”

Issa, a Vista entrepreneur and the most successful businessman in Congress, frames the issue in exactly correct fashion: If present compensation is so generous that federal employees almost never seek greener pastures, then pay and benefits are obviously perfectly adequate. Not only shouldn’t they be increased, maybe they should be cut.

But in Washington, as in Sacramento, such logic prompts expressions of horror from unions. Why? Because government’s primary role isn’t to provide services to the public. It’s to provide really good jobs. They’re not mad at Issa. They’re mad at Obama.

“Instead of holding to its promise to protect the middle class and the working poor, the administration seems determined to contribute to a worsening of living standards for federal workers, disabled veterans, and the elderly,”  American Federal of Government Employees president J. David Cox Sr. told the Alabama Media Group.

The common-sense observations of Issa remind me of one of my many gripes with how reporters cover government: They don’t see obvious issues that are right in front of them. If upper management benefits from the same sort of automatic “step” pay increases as the rank-and-file, that’s a huge conflict of interest that leads to pay hikes. Duh. But do you ever see this mentioned in coverage of government pay negotiations? Never.

There’s also this avenue of ignorance: We continue to witness a productivity revolution in the private sector driven by information technology that began two decades ago and is still transforming industries, white collar and blue collar alike. Shouldn’t this bleed over into the public sector? Of course. The respected McKinsey consulting group has been making this point for nearly a decade.

“The opportunity to improve government productivity is huge … [with] three classic management tools . . . organizational redesign, strategic procurement and operational redesign.”

 But do journalists ever bring this up? Nope. Duh.

By Chris Reed

The Sacramento Bee’s Jon Ortiz had a piece Thursday about the grotesque mess that is California state government that had lots of interesting details about the extent of the dysfunction:

“Last year, Gov. Jerry Brown christened an overhaul of the state’s personnel system, aiming to correct the wandering course of a government beset with arcane, conflicting rules that confound even the most experienced human resources managers.

“Now that overhaul faces a very public test with the state’s probe into ‘additional appointments.’

“Several agencies have cited the obscure 34-year-old policy as justification for giving salaried managers and supervisors secondary jobs that pay an hourly wage. The policy is so old that it exists only on paper. It’s confusing, imprecise and desperately needs updating.

“There are probably dozens — maybe hundreds — of similar personnel rules and regulations that departments — those that know about them, anyway — read and apply differently.”

Not in public employees’ interest to fix state’s mess

But Ortiz’s column, like so many other stories and analyses over the years, doesn’t acknowledge one reason why the chaos exists and has been tolerated. Indeed, he even asserts that it’s in everyone’s interest to fix the mess, because ….

” … an archaic, dysfunctional state government personnel system hurts everyone.

“‘Calcified personnel practices that were intended to measure “merit” discourage highly qualified people from applying for and landing state jobs, the independent, bipartisan Little Hoover Commission concluded eight years ago.”

Oh, what a load of hooey. An “archaic, dysfunctional state government” is one in which employee performance can’t be measured, employee efficiency can’t be improved and employee positions can’t be reduced.

Connect the dots. If the information-technology revolution had been allowed to transform the public sector as it has the private sector, we’d see government doing as much as it used to with far fewer workers. Instead, the IT revolution never made it to the public sector, including and especially in the state that’s home to Silicon Valley. Instead of doing more with less, we have chaos and overlap and confusion.

Government productivity gains could be ‘huge’

And, no, it’s not true that the public and private sectors are so different that the IT revolution couldn’t make a difference in government efficiency. Here’s what the respected McKinsey consulting group said nearly a decade ago: “the opportunity to improve government productivity is huge … [with] three classic management tools . . . organizational redesign, strategic procurement and operational redesign.”

More on the topic from a column I did last year to mark the 200th anniversary of the peak of the Luddite movement in England:

“The key to [government] redesign is to stop building off the presumption that we need to have workers gather in the same building to handle routine tasks, and to require that consumers of government services go to these buildings, too.

“I once had to go to the Poway DMV to get a copy of a vehicle registration that I had lost because it was the only local DMV that had an appointment slot available within two weeks. Why? Why? Why? For God’s sake, in an era in which you can design your next car and do a zillion other things on the Internet, why do you ever have to drive to a government office anywhere to fill out a permit or pick up a form?

“Where are the virtual offices? Where are the MBA consultants who come in and spot ineffeciences and outline changes that seem obvious in retrospect? Why don’t we see the IT revolution depopulate government bureaucracies the same way it wiped out travel agencies?

“Because of 21st-century Luddites who hide behind claims of defending the middle class. The reality is that we’re seeing what is in essence immense featherbedding across all levels of government.”

This is why California’s state government is dysfunctional and chaotic: Because if it were run rationally and like a competent large corporation, we probably could get by just fine with half the state workers we now have.

This is what’s at stake in the fight over making state government more functional. Jon Ortiz may not have figured it out, but you can bet the unions have. And if the lunatics running the state Public Employment Relation Board have their say, the Brown administration will end its reform push after having been told that reform is only OK if it’s been collectively bargained.