Update: The Senate voted yes on cloture. What this means is now the bill can come up for a vote to pass it with a simple majority.
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 is now online.
The amended Senate version, February 7, 2009 is here (click this) (large pdf).
To find out the latest, well frankly watch the Senate Floor Proceedings and also go to The Library of Congress links.
Huffington Post is hosting a what's in the bill citizen legislative text watchdog volunteer tell us what you found effort.
The Buy American provisions are on page 414, line 12. This covers Steel, Iron and probably the most important provision, use of American made manufactured goods.
A minor change to make financial institutions using TARP funds to be categorized as H-1B dependent employers is in this bill.
There are no provisions in the current bill to stop these government expenditures from going offshore, using guest workers or illegal labor. In other words putting the condition on use of U.S. taxpayer funds to hire U.S. workers. This would be in the services and construction areas, where most of the research, I.T. and smart grid, construction stimulative jobs would be created.
For further background here are previous posts:
How Many Stimulus Jobs Could Be Offshorable?
What's in the Stimulus Bill? Part III
What's in the Stimulus Bill" Part II
What's in the Stimulus Bill? Part I
42% of the bill is now tax cuts.
An insightful critique by economist and now pundit Paul Krugman shows the CBO GDP deficit estimates and how this bill will not plug up those GDP contraction numbers nearly enough.
(note, Krugman seems to ignore completely the global arbitrage and offshore issues that are a major issue to most of America...are U.S. taxpayers propping up other national economies?)
It's a huge bill and one of the problems with these rushed large pieces of legislation are so often, after they have passed does the public discover some horrific provision or clause that no one in their right mind would support.
Comments
Loads of free traders seem to ignore
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Maximum jobs, not maximum profits.
census
is only done every 10 years and has a lot of statistical problems. So, you will not see month by month updates.
Also, they miss a lot of people and one of the huge controversies in estimating the negative costs of illegal immigration is they do not break up anything in the census by immigration/visa status. So, they "mix up" all those of Hispanic ethnicity (which is really insulting because that's something like 30 different countries!) as all being the same. They don't divide by skills, educational level, country, legal, illegal status, on a guest worker Visa or perm, U.S. citizen and so on.
That messes up badly labor economists who need detailed raw statistics on demographics to obtain accuracy on their models and equations.
It's also used (both parties) as a political tool because it determines congressional districts.
As far as the idea of using U.S. taxpayer money to only (I would say preferred) recirculate within the domestic economy of the citizens who are footing the bill...
I don't see the problem here. It's not the same as private sector money, this is domestic government expenditures.
Like food stamps. So many states have offshore outsourced the entire management of food stamps. That makes zero sense to me. Those jobs could be done by Americans, at home, and what a great thing for the disabled, those with small kids, those who are already home bound and who probably are using food stamps.
Wouldn't it be better to provide jobs to those who cannot get a job and even possible take a few people off of the food stamp books by giving them a real job?
Never mind keeping U.S. taxpayer funds circulating within the U.S. economy.
You realize slashdot has techies from all over the world commenting and so very often you will have those techies who are loyal or interested in their own national economy agenda....posting fictional economics, etc. The same is true with sites like dailykos. They do not limit anyone based on geographical location. I'm not either unless they anonymous drive by writes something that's pure fiction.
This reminds me, if you see a comment with "payday loans" or "buy gold" in a link in it...that's a troll and troll rate that comment. They are just trying to promote their Internet scam site. Think about it, payday loans? It's a troll. They pay people overseas to post "content relative" comments trying to link up their Internet scam site.
I'll post it here when it is refined and ready
For both.
I think when it comes to utilization numbers, I want the illegal immigrants in there. After all the real point of utilization is number of jobs/number of mouths to feed, and the negative side of illegal immigration is more mouths to feed. Plus, you can bet the jobs of illegal immigrants are being counted on the employment side of things, so it will balance out. I realize that's against some of my personal ideology- but mathematically and from a "no fictional economics" sense, x+y/a+y should equal x/a anyway- and if it doesn't, that's as valuable to know as x/a.
The idea of subsidies being for internal use only comes from one of the arguments for subsidies to begin with- that without the subsidy, American farms simply are not economically viable any more, people have come to expect food to be below production cost (a great example is the vanishing industry of milk delivery and small dairy farmers- it's viable at $4-$5/gallon, but supermarkets use milk as a loss leader at $2 a gallon to keep inventory rotating and to bring in customers to buy other stuff, thus providing a consumer expectation that milk should be $2/gallon even though that's far below dairy cost). Well, now thanks to these stupid trade agreements, a lot more NECESSARY industries to our national security are no longer economically viable, so shouldn't they have subsidies also?
Plus, it gives us a chance to clean up a very real complaint against the WTO in the third world- that North American/European agricultural subsidies are causing massive displacement of substance level farming all over the world, including several mass suicides.
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Maximum jobs, not maximum profits.