Merrill Matthews, Contributor President Obama has proposed spending another $450 billion to create jobs, but there are companies that want to do exactly that and need neither subsidies nor encouragement: the oil and gas companies. They are ready, willing and able to hire more workers—if only the White House would let them.The president has spent more than two and a half years and trillions of dollars trying to reduce the unemployment rate, which seems stuck around 9.0 percent—and the administration’s budget director recently said he thinks it will stay there through 2012.So far the president has put all of his energy-industry cards in creating “green jobs,” while doing his best to strangle the oil and gas industry. As Wall Street Journal editorial page editor Paul Gigot commented on Fox News Sunday, the Obama policy is “the idea that you can politically allocate capital, you can have government-direct investment, and you can create jobs, you can create wealth. And the fact is, it can’t. We discovered that. There are $39 billion worth of these Energy Department loans in addition to Solyndra [the now defunct green energy company that received a $527 million taxpayer-funded loan from the Obama administration]. How many jobs have they created by one measure? Four thousand. I think that’s $10 million a job …”Folks, this is policy and fiscal madness. Oil and gas companies directly employ more than 2 million Americans, from blue-collar workers to well-trained scientists and engineers.Read more here.