How is it that every variety of government mandate, regulation, and tax is now called a jobs bill?

The totally disinterested California Air Resources Board (nice acronym, folks) concludes that AB 32 — the Golden State’s legislation to curb global warming (El Niño must be back, if it’s once again OK to use that term) – won’t cost the state jobs, the Sacramento Bee reports.

Now, maybe CSUS’s estimate of 1 million jobs lost is a highball figure, and maybe the AB 32 Implementation Group’s estimate of 485,000 jobs lost is similarly too dire. But I am willing to predict that the jobs created by the bill — compact-flourescent torque engineers, solar-panel nettoyeurs — will be just outnumbered by the California jobs destroyed or foreclosed by the spike in energy prices and fall-off in power reliability. Call me crazy.

Still, just as with Nancy Pelosi’s promise that Waxman-Markey will mean “jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs,” there is some truth to the CARB claim: AB 32 will mean jobs for Nevada, jobs for Texas, jobs for Florida . . .