The Conservative View By Russell Turner

THE CONSERVATIVE VIEW

BY RUSSELL TURNER

A BREAD SANDWICH

Whenever I go to my local sandwich shop I expect to get a sandwich that has something between the two slices of bread instead of empty space. If some new shop opened up and advertised a sandwich at an incredibly low price, most all of us would be skeptical at the very least. If we happened to purchase one of those cheap sandwiches and found that it was only two pieces of bread, most of us wouldn’t be very happy. Over the past couple of years it seems like we Americans have been receiving a bunch of bread sandwiches.


It seems like we are continually bombarded with some kind of gimmick to stimulate our economy. At the very best they are only effective for a short period of time. One example was the CASH FOR CLUNKERS program that was supposed to revive the auto industry in this country. Many consumers bought foreign made autos that had higher gas mileage ratings than domestic autos. Even now our president is promoting more of these quick fix gimmicks in his jobs program. If a doctor treated his patients in the same way, he would be only treating the symptoms and ignoring the disease.


Recently I saw an ABC news report about a loan that the Obama administration gave to a foreign company to develop and build a $97,000 electric sports car. According to their estimates the 529 million dollar loan would create thousands of American jobs. Now, just two years later, those thousands of jobs have dwindled to around 500 and the biggest joke is, the jobs are in Finland. Instead of using some of the closed American auto plants to build the cars and using American workers, the company felt that it was in their best interest to build the electric cars in Finland.


I feel that it is entirely inappropriate for our president to support giving US taxpayer money to any foreign individual or company. Has it ever occurred to him that those people are in competition with us Americans? At one time the manufacturing capability of this country was awesome. If left alone the capitalist entrepreneurs of this country would see the need and fulfill that need. Instead of giving money for research and development to foreign competitors, maybe they should think about funding our engineering schools in our own country such as MIT.


We Americans have been paying for a super sub sandwich but we have been just getting two slices of bread and little else.