One problem is that most big US corporations are multinational. A buy American provision could very well hurt their foreign operations. This makes me wonder how the Buy American provision is to work. US Steel owns the former Canadian steelmaker Stelco. Does Buy American allow US steel to ship steel made in its Canadian plant to the US?
Also, many US based companies are foreign owned. Is it buying American to buy from these plants? Is buying a foreign car made or assembled in the US buying American?
Blog: http://kenthink7.blogspot.com/index.html Blog: http://kencan7.blogspot.com/index.html
--- On Wed, 2/4/09, James Leveque <leveque.james at gmail.com> wrote:
> From: James Leveque <leveque.james at gmail.com>
> Subject: [lbo-talk] Question on "Buy American"
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Wednesday, February 4, 2009, 1:23 AM
> If anybody has any thoughts on this, I would love to hear
> them.
>
> I've been following the debate on the "Buy
> American" clauses in the House
> and Senate stimulus bills. I've heard a number of
> arguments against the
> clause (possible violation of WTO rules, may not create
> that many jobs,
> might set off a trade war - whatever that might entail),
> but can't find many
> arguments in favor of the clauses. The closest thing to an
> argument in
> favor is from Paul Krugman (Here's ya link:
> http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/01/protectionism-and-stimulus-wonkish/)
> who also throws in a number of cons for good measure.
>
> Are the "buy american" clauses likely to make ANY
> discernible difference in
> the manufacturing sector, or at least U.S. steel (which I
> understand is the
> main target of the clauses)? Another question I have is,
> exactly how much
> damage are we doing to foreign exporters buy inserting the
> clause in the
> stim package? It's interesting to watch the
> Republicans go to the mat for
> European industrialists, given that the Republican platform
> for some time
> now seems like it could have been summed with the words
> "Screw Europe."
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