Tuesday, February 09, 2010

ABC News' hit job on China

What a horrible piece of journalism. ABC News grimly reports that stimulus money spent on clean/green energy has resulted in -- horrors! -- hundreds of Chinese workers employed building wind turbines for export to the U.S. Unsurprisingly, economic dunce Sen. Chuck Schumer figures prominently. In the entire segment, however, journalist Jon Karl amazingly never asks the obvious question of why the turbines are manufactured in China instead of the U.S.

The answer, of course, is that building them in China is cheaper. While ABC News seems to think it is a scandal that taxpayer money is going to support Chinese jobs, as a taxpayer I would be outraged if the funding was set aside for more expensive U.S. production, which would require even more of my dollars to acquire the same number of turbines.

In fact, the story only makes sense if the actual purpose of the stimulus money is to distribute money to U.S. workers, rather than actually purchase useful things the government requires. If that's the case, then let's dispense with pretensions, redistribute some wealth, and just start sending U.S. government checks at random to various workers.

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