More jobs lost- Bridge to Somewhere made in China!
- 3 years behind schedule, $5.2 Billion over budget. And China gets the jobs.
Here’s what Clyde Prestowitz had to say in Foreign Policy recently on this Oakland Bay Bridge debacle:
“California exported more than 2,500 manufacturing jobs to China and then added insult to injury by spending taxpayer dollars to send 250 public and private workers to China to provide training. In effect, at a time of economic hardship and rising unemployment in the United States, the state of California provided funding and training to create jobs and make workers more competitive in China. “
But didn’t we avoid the pollution by letting them do all that smelting and welding and cutting over there???
Maybe not.
Prestowitz: “It is also important to note that the steel producers and fabricators in China don’t even come close to meeting California’s own green environmental standards. It has been estimated that as much as a quarter of the particulate matter in California air now originates in China. So the bridge deal is shifting production from relatively green U.S. producers operating under California’s tough environmental standards to brown Chinese producers whose work on the bridge is adding to the pollution of California air. In effect, the state is conniving to violate its own environmental standards in order to achieve savings that were never realistic and that have not only evaporated but become cost overruns.”
Nicely done, team. Nicely done.
The bondholders and people using the bridge will be paying the Chinese for a long time.
Net Jobs to the US? Hmmmm?