Harper threatens Obama, either stick with your tade agreements or lose em!

[Kasz216]

SamuelRSmith said:

Kasz216 said:

SamuelRSmith said:
2 points I'd like to make on this:

2 - Neither the USA nor Canada should partake in trade for political reasons. Canada should not sell oil to America to support their interests (indeed, the entire oil market should be private, anyway, I don't see why the Canadian government should be getting involved), nor should the USA institute a "Buy American" clause, it should just look for deals that are most cost-effective, particularly when having a $1.2tn deficit.

To be fair, it's a "Buy American" clause was only for the wasted stimulus money anyway.

I mean, if your plan is to waste money to stimulate the economy by giving money to us buisnesses it only makes sense you'd make it US only.

Stimulus spending doesn't really work if your spending all that money in Canada and China.

Well, it doesn't work anyway, but i mean if you believe in that it does... having the money going to other countries is a waste.

Ah, my bad. Still, it's easy to see bias in most governments when it comes to contract deals, and it's easy to see why. This is one area where I do applaud the British Government, they do tend to try to ignore country of origin a lot more than other governments, despite electoral pressure.

Actually, on the whole, the British are less prone to protectionism than most of the world, the only protectionism we really have is the EU imposed stuff... and we constantly lobby against it. (Also, green subsidies, though I don't believe the intentions are protectionism, that is one of the end results).

Oh yeah.  Of course the other option the US uses is "Lowest bid" which in of itself has problems because the standards don't always seem to be set, and there is nothing holding someone too that lowest bid half the time.

Lately though a fun new reason why the Congress hands out contracts how it does has been revealed.

For some reason, insider trading doesn't include congressmen.

So say a senator knows a bank is about to fail ahead of time.  He can short the bank, tell the country they are about to fail and make a ton of money off it.  Actually there are claims that has actually happened!

Apparently according to of all people Jack Abarmoff, who probably knows a thing or two about the undersided part of washington, it happens by both parties all the time.

Which tends to explain why senators tend to leave millionaries even when they weren't when they went in, despite the 170,000 salary.