What do Finnish cars, Mexican solar panels, and Danish windmills have in common? They were all funded by your tax dollars.
Thanks to President Obama, taxpayer money, mostly in the form of stimulus funds, ended up in the hands of companies overseas. Instead of creating jobs in America, the stimulus and other Obama policies created jobs or sent money to Finland, New Zealand, Indonesia, India, Mexico, Germany, Australia, Switzerland, China, Denmark, South Korea, the Dominican Republic, Thailand, Vietnam, Italy, Russia, Luxembourg, El Salvador, Great Britain, Spain, Japan, and France.
How did this happen? Consider the example of Fisker Automotive. The company received $500 million in loan guarantees from the U.S. government to produce electric cars. Then they took their money and decided to produce their $100,000 electric sports cars in Finland.
President Obama's policies may be spurring job creation in Scandinavia. But here at home, twenty-three million Americans are struggling for work. Millions of middle class families can barely make ends meet.
The billions of dollars that went overseas largely had to be borrowed. In other words, President Obama borrowed money from countries like China to send money to... countries like China. It's that kind of reckless spending that led President Obama to rack up $5.6 trillion in debt over the last three and a half years, bringing our total national debt to $15.8 trillion.
In 2009, when President Obama touted his stimulus, Americans were desperate for jobs and hungry for leadership. The president and his administration promised they had the situation under control, vowing their stimulus would lower the unemployment rate to around 5.6 percent by today. But today the unemployment rate stands at 8.2 percent. June was the 41st straight month with an unemployment rate above 8 percent.
By the president's own standard, the stimulus was an abject failure. It's not hard to see why.
Over the last four years, President Obama has repeated his promise to create "jobs that pay well and can't be outsourced." Chalk that up as yet another broken promise.
Because of the president's dismal record and his campaign's desperation to change the subject, they have lately attacked Gov. Romney on false charges of outsourcing. Independent fact checkers have determined Obama's claims are blatantly false. The Obama campaign knows this, but they continue the attacks anyway. That's how desperate they are to hide their broken promises, including their record on outsourcing.
But if they want to talk about outsourcing, they should explain to the American people why they took our tax dollars and sent them abroad. Why did they let precious resources go to waste? Why did they rack up debt to create foreign jobs?
This blatant hypocrisy has become the trademark of the Obama campaign. They complain about negative ads while running the most negative campaign in history. They resort to hype and blame after being elected promising hope and change.
In early 2009, President Obama said in an interview, "I will be held accountable" for the economy. So, will President Obama, the real Outsourcer-in-Chief, hold himself accountable for sending the recovery overseas?
I wouldn't bet the Danish wind farm on it.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/may/03/americans-prosperity/ad-says-stimulus-tax-credits-funded-jobs-finland/
Rethinking Free Trade
"by Robert Kuttner
WHEN PAUL Samuelson, the dean of American economists, begins questioning the benefits of free trade, it is a bit like the pope having doubts about the virgin birth. But Samuelson, a Nobel laureate and the author of America's best-known economics textbook, has reopened a debate on the most settled issue in economics. He's done it with a stunner of an article in the Journal of Economic Perspectives that has created immense controversy -- and an opportunity for Americans to rethink previously unchallenged assumptions.
[snip]
But here Samuelson dissents. What if the lower-wage country also captures the advanced industry?
If enough higher-paying jobs are lost by American workers to outsourcing, he calculates, then the gain from the cheaper prices may not compensate for the loss in US purchasing power. In other words, the low wages at Wal-Mart do not necessarily make up for their bargain prices.
"Free trade is not always a win-win situation," Samuelson concludes. It is particularly a problem, he says, in a world where large countries with far lower wages, such as India and China, are increasingly able to make almost any product or offer almost any service performed in the United States.
If we trade freely with them, then the powerful drag of their far lower wages will begin dragging down our average wages..."
they just want to say, let us do the same things we have been doing
for the last twenty years when we have power and hope things are better
for the middle class, despite the fact that every time they take power
the economy goes in the toilet by the time they leave office.
Tell me one time in modern history when a Republican administration left
the country in better financial state than when they came in?
More jobs were lost in the recession of 2007-09 than in the previous four recessions combined. At the current pace, it looks as if it will take until late 2016 to make up for the net job loss to date of 7.5 million. There were six million jobs outsourced under President Bush and then we lost 8.5 million jobs under the recession the GOP passed to the current administration. Isn't that 8.5 million jobs lost and 6 million outsourced jobs really close to the 15 million unemployed Americans? Bush and the Republicans ended their term with payroll employment below where it was when they took office, the first time that’s happened since the Hoover administration.
http://prospect.org/article/plight-american-manufacturing
http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/PLAW-108publ357/pdf/PLAW-108publ357.pdf
Additionally they passed:
H.RES.830,
to amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to remove impediments in such Code and make our manufacturing, service, and high-technology businesses and workers more competitive and productive abroad.
S.1637,
Permits foreign corporations to be treated as U.S. corporations for purposes of the extraterritorial income tax exclusion.
Provides for a three-year period of transitional relief for taxpayers who were eligible for the exclusion for extraterritorial income by allowing a tax deduction based upon such taxpayers' average amount.
All of this passed in 2004. So the Dems did not control anything.
The movement of American factory jobs and white-collar work to other countries is part of a positive transformation that will enrich the U.S. economy over time, even if it causes short-term pain and dislocation, the Bush administration said. The embrace of foreign "outsourcing," became an issue in the 2004 elections, and was contained in the president's annual report to Congress on the U.S. economy.
"Outsourcing is just a new way of doing international trade," said N. Gregory Mankiw, chairman of Bush's Council of Economic Advisors, which prepared the report. "More things are tradable than were tradable in the past. And that's a good thing." The report itself, under Bush's signature, offered similarly encouraging words, asserting that "when a good or service is produced more cheaply abroad, it makes more sense to import it than make or provide it domestically." Mankiw and the president's report contend that the U.S. economy ultimately will benefit when the production of goods and services finds its way to the nation that can render them most efficiently.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&contentId=A30194-2004Feb10
check it out for yourself
"There was no contract manufacturer in the U.S. that could actually produce our vehicle," the car company's founder and namesake told ABC News. "They don't exist here."
you were saying?
"the company plans to build in a shuttered GM facility in Delaware." plans?
that has not been done yet...so the money is in finland.