Article by: Jeff Fish

Green jobs are going to China, says a report by ABC News that shed light on just how carelessly stimulus funds and taxpayer money is being spent.

According to the report, Congress approved nearly $2 billion in stimulus funds for wind energy and 80 percent of it funded jobs overseas.

A Chinese company called A Power is being paid $450 million in stimulus funds to build a wind farm in West Texas, employing 2,000 Chinese workers to build the turbines and only 300 American workers to build the Farm.

The law written in Congress funds projects regardless of where the equipment was made, showing no concern for the millions of Americans who are out of work and struggling.

In the report, New York Senator Chuck Schumer (D) spoke out against the bill’s funding of overseas jobs, saying that the stimulus funds were meant to create American jobs. “This is one of those stories [that when] you tell people outside the beltway and everywhere else in America, they just cannot believe [it] and it makes people lose faith in government, and frankly it infuriates me.”

Schumer told ABC News that he tried to address the issue with the White House, which refused to acknowledge the problem.

It is no surprise that the White House denied the problem of using stimulus to outsource jobs, because they are trying to convince the American people that the unemployment rate is going down.

In truth, the unemployment rate is deceiving because it only counts those that are out of work but still actively looking for a job. After a period of time, those unemployed who have given up on the job hunt are no longer counted as part of the labor force and thus not technically unemployed. So while the unemployment rate continues to hover around ten percent, the labor force has been shrinking, leaving more unemployed people unaccounted for.

Denying the problem is the exact same kind of policy that goes against Obama’s campaign promise of transparency and accountability. The president signed a bill that the American people knew virtually nothing about and stuck his head in the sand when confronted with the fact that funds have gone to stimulate economies other than our own.

These funds are at least a contributing factor to China currently leading in the global green jobs race. In the first half of 2009, China passed the U.S. in the number of wind turbines built, according to Reuters.

China has an unofficial rule that 70 percent of the turbine is made of local products, meaning that most of each turbine was put together by Chinese hands. The same should be true in the U.S. about turbines, or any government-funded project.

Our tax money should not fund jobs for people in other countries. Congress should only pass legislation that ensures that every job created is an American job especially during such tough economic times.

Something like this should have been made public before the bill was passed, allowing people to pressure their senators and representatives not to vote on the bill. This begs the question as to what other kinds of senseless or even harmful legislation is being passed through Congress that we don’t even know about.