Clinton would kill coal jobs

Her comment could have been no surprise to miners and their families. Clinton has been vowing for more than a year to make President Barack Obama’s war on coal and affordable electricity seem like a skirmish if she is elected president.

Clinton, comfortably in the lead for the Democrat Party nomination for president, now seems positively boastful about her plans for the coal industry and for the coal-fired power plants on which tens of millions of Americans rely for reasonably priced electricity.

She wants to shut down as many mines as she can. She plans to use draconian taxes to make it impractical for utilities to use coal for power generation.

And Clinton has much the same strategy in mind for natural gas.

During the same campaign stop, Clinton insisted that as president, she would help miners who lose their jobs because of her policies. She has not been specific about that, no doubt because if she has a plan, it is much like the socialist government strategies of the past: Offer laid-off workers a few years of unemployment benefits, then forget about them.

Oh, no, Clinton and her supporters insist. There’s more than that. Why, all those displaced West Virginia and Ohio miners can get new jobs in “alternative energy,” she claims.

What about those tens of millions of families who will pay much higher electric bills if Clinton is elected and is permitted to follow through with her bragging? What does she have in mind for them? Alternative energy, too – at $1,000 or more a year in higher electric bills?

Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., contacted Clinton about her comment. In a letter to him, she reiterated her claim she wants to help those hurt by her anti-coal campaign. “I was mistaken in my remarks” at Columbus, she added.

Indeed, she may have slipped up verbally – but only to be honest, for once, about her agenda to destroy coal and coal-fired power first and worry about the consequences later.

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