Same pen that urges ‘Buy American’ put thousands out of work

January 27, 2021 in News by RBN Staff

 

Source: One News Now

Chris Woodward (OneNewsNow.com)

 

President Biden has signed an executive order directing federal agencies to “Buy American” but that patriotic promise is drawing mixed reviews since thousands of Americans are out of work with the stroke of the President’s pen.

The order signed Jan. 25 by Biden (pictured at right) follows a campaign pledge to tighten federal rules that dictate U.S. government purchases here at home but it comes less than a week after Biden, on his first day in the White House, revoked the permit for adding 800 miles to the massive Keystone XL pipeline that currently runs from Canada to the Gulf Coast.

The pipeline has become a symbol of job creation versus carbon pollution, and Biden sided with environmental activists and their concerns by killing it and thus ending good-paying, blue-collar jobs related to its construction.

Neal Crabtree, a welding foreman from Arkansas, said he was among the first to be laid off and was sickened when he was forced to lay off the rest of his team that was working in Nebraska, Fox News, citing Crabtree’s Facebook post, reported.

“We’ve got guys that haven’t worked in months, and in some cases years,” Crabtree later told Fox News, “and to have a project of this magnitude canceled, it’s going to hurt a lot of people, a lot of families, a lot of communities.”

Revoking the permit is one of several “critical first steps to address the climate crisis,” Biden said, but Crabtree told the cable news outlet the new pipeline has become one of the “villains” of environmentalists when the crude oil is already flowing to the market through the current pipeline.

Among other job-killing plans, President Biden is also pushing a $15 minimum wage in his $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package that some predict could cost millions of jobs when many businesses are hit with a higher payroll.

Speaking to Fox News about the “Buy American” pledge, Brandon Arnold of the National Taxpayers Union said Biden promised to improve our relationships with trading partners but then angered Canada by yanking the Keystone XL permit.

TransCanada Keystone XL“This energy project that was going to create jobs, thousands of jobs, both for Canadians and for Americans,” said Arnold, “that really ticked off our neighbors to the north, and now, by putting these more restrictive ‘Buy American’ policies in place, we are further exacerbating some of the trade problems that we’ve had.”

Asked for the best way to help American businesses and workers, Arnold said improving trade agreements across the globe is the answer.

“That’s something Trump worked on, (but) I don’t think he went quite far enough,” said Arnold. “I think there’s a lot more work that we can do to hem in China, for instance, by creating stronger trade relationships in the Pacific but also to foster a better business climate here in the United States.”

Trump improved the business climate here at home by dropping the corporate tax rate, for example, Arnold said, but Biden appears to be going back to the Obama “playbook” of spending billions of taxpayers’ dollars in an ill-fated attempt to improve the economy.