Stimulus Package Increases Trade Deficit: Replaces U.S. Jobs with Foreign “Green Jobs”

More on the "green" and "new" economic madness.

Source by Hans Bader

The $800 billion stimulus package is shipping American jobs overseas.  More than 79 percent of “green jobs” funding under the stimulus package went to foreign firms.  Meanwhile, to pay for the stimulus package, the government borrowed a huge amount of money from the American people, money that would otherwise have been spent on American products, or been invested in America’s companies.
The stimulus package has also destroyed thousands of jobs in America’s export sector by triggering trade wars that America lost.  It also subsidized countless examples of government waste.
Spain’s “green jobs” program, a model for Obama’s green-jobs and global-warming programs, has turned out to be a complete bust, destroying jobs and contributing to Spain’s skyrocketing government deficit.  (Earlier, Obama’s green jobs czar, Van Jones, resigned over his 9/11 conspiracy theories.  He was hired by Obama despite his long history of Marxism and racism, arrest record, and glorification of a convicted murderer.)

The Washington Examiner earlier explained how the global-warming bill backed by Obama will lead to deforestation, and thus increase greenhouse gas emissions in the long run.  Obama’s so-called “cap-and-trade” bill is full of pay-offs for special interests.  Obama once admitted that under his cap-and-trade scheme, electricity and utility bills would “skyrocket” and coal-fed power plants would go “bankrupt.”  Treasury Department analysts estimated it could increase taxes on the average American household by $1761 per year.  The bill contains environmentally-harmful provisions, such as massive ethanol subsidies, which will result in “damage to water supplies, soil health and air quality.” Ethanol subsidies have resulted in forests being destroyed in the Third World, and caused famines that have killed countless people in the world’s poorest countries.

The cap-and-trade global-warming tax is yet another violation of Obama’s campaign promise not to raise taxes on anyone making less than $250,000 a year.  Obama has admitted that its cost will be passed “on to consumers,” like middle-class homeowners and motorists.
“Nearly two-thirds of Americans do not believe the $787 billion stimulus package the president passed last year has helped create jobs, according to a new Pew Research Center poll.”

As the Washington Examiner notes, “a recent survey of business economists showed they didn’t think the stimulus was creating jobs, either.”  President Obama falsely claimed that virtually all economists supported his stimulus package, but this was patently untrue at the time he made this claim, when at least 200 economists publicly opposed it, and it  is even more untrue now.

Obama falsely claimed that the $787 billion stimulus package was needed to prevent “irreversible decline,” but the Congressional Budget Office admitted that it would actually shrink the economy “in the long run”.  The stimulus package has since destroyed thousands of jobs in America’s export sector, and subsidized countless examples of government waste and corruption.

Unemployment has skyrocketed past European levels, as big-spending countries have fared worse than thrifty ones.  As the Examiner notes, “If his stimulus program was approved, Obama promised, unemployment would not go above 8 percent . . . The reality is that it passed 10.3 percent.”
Nobel Prize-winning economist Gary Becker says that Obama’s policies are delaying economic recovery.
“How is stimulus money allocated? Unemployment isn’t a factor, but politics is,” found George Mason University researcher Veronique de Rugy in a recent study.

Districts where people are struggling and unemployment is high are not receiving any more money than those in which unemployment is low, even though a stated purpose of the $800 billion stimulus package was to help the unemployed.  But politics mattered in doling out federal funds.  And “Democratic districts also received two-and-a-half times more stimulus dollars than Republican districts.”

There are three trillion dollars in tax increases in Obama’s proposed budget, yet it would still borrow 42 cents on the dollar, resulting in colossal deficits.
Obama’s policies would raise the national debt by $9.7 trillion, noted the Congressional Budget Office.
Earlier, one of Obama’s own advisers worried that the “barrage of tax increases” in his budgets could harm the economy and prevent a “sustained” economic recovery.
In 2008, Obama promised a “net spending cut,” but as soon as he was elected, he proposed massive spending increases.