In his desperate attack on Lou Barletta Congressman Paul Kanjorski claims that Barletta favors tax breaks for companies sending jobs overseas. Hold one, I am laughing so hard I need to get up off the floor. Let's not leave Chris Carney off the hook either.
Barack Obama has been sending stimulus money to China. Even his own party people are begging him to stop.
"Today, we are demanding the Obama administration suspend this program immediately," said Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.
The program has already spent $2 billion, funding enough projects to power 2.4 million homes. Any wind farm created in the U.S. is eligible for stimulus money to put up wind turbines, regardless of where those massive structures are made. Each turbine costs about $3 million, and reaches 40 stories into the sky.
An investigation by ABC News and the Investigative Reporting Workshop found that 79 percent of the program's money has gone to foreign companies, money that Schumer said was "federal tax dollars, the stimulus, which was sold as jobs in America."
The senators are especially alarmed about a project highlighted by ABC News in West Texas that uses turbines manufactured in China. The Texas wind farm is eligible for up to $450 million in stimulus funds.
The frustrated senators are concerned, though, that some of the money is also paying for manufacturing jobs in China, and they are pushing a bill requiring that stimulus projects create jobs in the United States. They want the wind energy program stopped before the Chinese turbine manufacturers can collect any money.
Obama's actions were met with such criticism that "Green" jobs are no longer on his agenda.
Noticeably absent from President Obama's latest economic-stimulus package are any further attempts to create jobs through "green" energy projects, reflecting a year in which the administration's original, loudly trumpeted efforts proved largely unfruitful.
The long delays typical with environmentally friendly projects - combined with reports of green stimulus funds being used to create jobs in China and other countries, rather than in the U.S. - appear to have killed the administration's appetite for pushing green projects as an economic cure.
The Department of Energy estimated that 82,000 jobs have been created and has acknowledged that as much as 80 percent of some green programs, including $2.3 billion of manufacturing tax credits, went to foreign firms that employed workers primarily in countries including China, South Korea and Spain, rather than in the United States.
Peter Morici, a business professor at the University of Maryland, said much of the green stimulus funding was "squandered."
Squandered??? And Paul Kanjorski wants to attack Barletta? Paul Kanjorski and Chris Carney voted for the stimulus bill that sent jobs overseas. Nuff said.
