This is just wrong .......
 

As a tax payer in the Commonwealth of Pa this shouldn't be ............

https://www.wtae.com/article/foreign...vania/28322186

Don’t blame Shell.

Blame years of poor US trade policy and uncontrolled, predatory capitalism that allowed China to build incredible production capacity and then dump steel around the world.

There used to be, may still be, enough steel production capacity in China to supply the world’s demand for most grades. A result of a central government pressuring each municipality to ‘make money and grow their tax revenues’.

I hear ya Craig but I would like to see tax credits bound by similar rules to those of State grants.

I agree. I tend to disfavor government intervention in the economy, but in this case, China's excess capacity should not penalize US factories.

Looking at Bethlehem PA, the former steel factory is now a casino - from a wealth-creator (iron ore in one end, ships and skyscrapers out the other) to an effective wealth-destroyer.

If you figure the economic impact of that, you can justify internal subsidies or external tariffs. Slippery path to be sure.

Tax credits only if using domestic products, in my opinion

Protectionism approach has been tried ages ago and failed.

So how about no tax credit for foreign sourced goods? A tax credit for domestic sourced goods and let each company decide what’s better for them. As it stands, I fail to see a reason to reward companies that are cheating on both ends.

I concur, I think this situation stands for the fact that it's western Pa where steel had dominated for so long.

My Dad grew up in monaca, my grandfather was a steel worker. I grew up not far from there. This is really sad to see, they should be using US steel!

It is, of course, anti-capitalistic and inherently socialist for the government to dictate to a private company where it should source its materials, but then again so is giving the company subsidies in the first place. If you want to dictate where a company sources, then it should be written into the subsidy agreement. I suspect many companies would balk at that though. In most cases subsidies are provided in the expectation of a company creating jobs - the questions are, is the project creating the jobs it was expected to, and was there ever any expectation with the original subsidies that sourcing of steel would be local?

The tax credits are based on the # of jobs and impact to the local economy, not on where they buy their construction materials


Not to say I agree or disagree on any opinion here, but it’s my understanding that China is the largest buyer of scrap metal in the world, meaning all that metal we are forced to recycle here in the USA, gets sold to China, then processed and sold back to the US as raw materials. When trade tariffs with China recently changed and China stopped buying scrap materials for recycling, townships in the USA had nowhere to send their collected materials so they just stopped recycling and mixed it all in with the trash at the dump. Townships/recycling centers have been selling these materials to China for years. If we are going to sell our scrap materials and require recycling, we should be encouraging foreign raw materials purchase when made from recycled materials.

Local production of raw materials from the earth is a dirty, destructive process. Most would agree recycling is a more environmentally responsible solution. Lets stop worrying about who produced it and where, and focus on how it was produced, best quality of final product, and overall impact on the world vs the local impact on the local community only.