I've noted before that when I was growing up, the unions would have commercials exhorting us to "look for the union label". That was back in the good old days when clothes were actually made in the U.S., and the workers in the factories were frequently unionized. After Reagan essentially broke the backs of the unions, and imports were becoming popular, the call was to "buy American". After 9/11, Bush asked us to just "buy buy buy".
Of course - for most Americans, "buy buy buy" means "charge charge charge". As a result (in addition to the housing bubble), the amount of money lent out by banks began to exceed their ability to cover the loans. Thus, the banking industry imploded and we are left teetering on the precipice of another depression. The latest "are you kidding?" bit of news is that
California is broke and has halted all payments. This is serious stuff.
Just like the last depression, the president is proposing we spend money on jobs, so that the pay these workers receive gets circulated back into the economy, hopefully revving it back up. I already covered in a
previous blog how the Republicans want to use tax cuts for their magical trickle-down theories, so I won't go over that again. This time, the controversy is over Buy American.
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