Obama leadership promotes U.S. technology, business, and labor
Today President Obama visited Holland, Michigan for the groundbreaking of a new battery plant that will produce the lithium batteries to be used in the new Chevrolet Volt which will also be built in America. For a while many of us wondered that without some leadership the transition from gasoline to electric vehicles would mean America switched from being dependent on oil to being dependent on batteries.
The Ayn Rand libertarians would have been content with that situation as government should have no role in economic development according to their beliefs. Fortunately, President Obama is living in the real world and realized that to let this situation develop due to a lack of seed money would have sentenced this country to dependence on other nations and forfeited many thousands of jobs we desperately need. In addition, we would have lost the manufacturing capacity and intellectual capital that accompanies all industrial development.
Here is the story from Detroit News
http://detnews.com/article/20100715/AUTO01/7150423/1148/rss25/Obama-on-Michigan-battery-plant---We-are-seeing-results-
It was a great day in the American auto industry for another reason as J.D. Power released their 2010 Automotive Performance, Execution, and Layout Study that showed that “New Car Owners like Domestic Brands over Imports”. Here’s the link
http://detnews.com/article/20100715/AUTO01/7150459/1148/rss25/Survey--New-car-owners-like-domestic-brands-over-imports
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posted by dg - 07/30/2010 3:22:40 PM |
From the Center for American Progress,
This week, economists Mark Zandi and Alan Blinder released a new report that is the first attempt to comprehensively estimate the effects of the policy responses to the economic crises of the last few years. They find that the government's direct intervention to stabilize the economy since 2008 "helped avert a second Depression" and that it can be "empirically proved." Zandi, a leading conservative who advised John McCain's presidential campaign, and Blinder, former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve, employed "straightforward" and "conventional" modeling techniques to simulate four scenarios that quantify the impact of both the fiscal stimulus and financial-market policies. The report finds that, without both the stimulus and financial policies, the "GDP in 2010 would be about 6 1/2 % lower, payroll employment would be less by some 8 1/2 million jobs, and the nation would now be experiencing deflation." The report highlights two government programs that significantly contributed to preventing further economic depression: President Bush's Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) and the fiscal stimulus package, which includes President Obama's American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). While noting that "particularly heavy criticism has been aimed at" both programs, Zandi and Blinder find that these programs were vital to staunching the economic bleeding that characterized the low point of the Great Recession. Despite this factual documentation, many Republican policymakers are nevertheless calling for a repeal of these successful programs. In slamming the government for its participation in the economic recovery, Republicans are essentially campaigning for "! Great Depression 2.0." |
