Say Anything Blog

This time its the steel industry, which is looking to the government to send them lots and lots of pork in Obama’s planned $850 billion - $1 trillion economic stimulus government make-work bill.

The steel industry, having entered the recession in the best of health, is emerging as a leading indicator of what lies ahead. As steel production goes — and it is now in collapse — so will go the national economy.

That maxim once applied to Detroit’s Big Three car companies, when they dominated American manufacturing. Now they are losing ground in good times and bad, and steel has replaced autos as the industry to watch for an early sign that a severe recession is beginning to lift.

The industry itself is turning to government for orders that, until the September collapse, had come from manufacturers and builders. Its executives are waiting anxiously for details of President-elect Barack Obama’s stimulus plan, and adding their voices to pleas for a huge public investment program — up to $1 trillion over two years — intended to lift demand for steel to build highways, bridges, electric power grids, schools, hospitals, water treatment plants and rapid transit.

“What we are asking,” said Daniel R. DiMicco, chairman and chief executive of the Nucor Corporation, a giant steel maker, “is that our government deal with the worst economic slowdown in our lifetime through a recovery program that has in every provision a ‘buy America’ clause.”

Economists in the Obama camp said the president-elect’s proposals to Congress will include significant infrastructure spending that draws on heavy industry.

So, because nobody in the private sector wants to buy products from these steel companies, Obama should force the taxpayers to buy up their products.

Oh, and Americans should be forced to buy more expensive domestic products instead of shopping for the best deals based on price and quality regardless of where the product originates.  Because nothing stimulates an economy like prices artificially inflated by restrictions on free trade.

What I’m wondering is why the steel industry is an more or less important than any other industry in America.  If people don’t buy enough at Wal-Mart should Obama use tax dollars to buy plasma TV’s and Nintendo Wii’s?  If Pizza Hut and Domino’s don’t do enough business, should Obama use our tax dollars to throw a massive party and keep them afloat?

All industries go through tough economic times.  I fail to see how keeping taxes high to fund massive expenditures of tax dollars to prop up the companies/industries that can’t survive is good policy.