Green Jobs here?...or China?

A group of Democratic senators is concerned that the Obama administration's efforts to promote economic stimulus, aimed at financing renewable energy, is creating jobs in foreign countries. The four senators, led by Chuck Schumer of New York, wrote to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner on Tuesday to request a moratorium on the Recovery Act program. They asked that the moratorium remain in place until they can pass legislation mandating stimulus aid flow only to projects which preserve and create U.S. jobs. Here's what's happening that nobody wants to talk about: Huge solar and wind projects are being funded with stimulus dollars in Texas, Oregon, and other states. That would seem like a good thing - and is creating jobs installing the solar panels and wind turbines. The problem is that the solar panels are made in China and the wind turbines are made in Denmark - and making the panels and turbines is far more labor-intensive - meaning jobs - than is just the installation and monitoring of them. So our "green" stimulus here in the US is creating jobs in Denmark and China. In large part, this is because all the Republicans and some of the Conserva-Dems opposed a "buy American" or "American-content" provision in the stimulus bill, which produced this predictable result. And the good news is that the Administration is apparently waking up to the idiocy of Reaganomics, Clintonomics, and Friedman's flat-earth stupidity. Keep an eye on this one.