Actually, that's a common misconception. NAFTA was signed by Bush Senior in 1992.
MakeAmericaSaneAgain. A 2016 political campaign.
- Thread starter KarvokaQueen
- Start date
- Original
Actually, that's a common misconception. NAFTA was signed by Bush Senior in 1992.
Bush championed it abroad and helped draft the agreement, but it had to be ratified by the legislature in each country. (And in the U.S., signed by the president or sent back to be passed by a supermajority of Congress it wouldn't have gotten.) Clinton signed it at home. Bush signed a piece of paper that basically said that this is what the U.S. would do. Clinton ratified the actual U.S. legal implementation into being.
Basically, it was Bush's baby, but Clinton could have killed it at the price of some international tension. He didn't and actually made it happen. Quoteing from wikipedia:
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I guess we will learn if the Republican congress actually believes their principals, or if they will vote for Trumps policies on a Party basis: from what I understand, he's at odds with the Party on a lot of issues.
Then again, this is the party that would vote against a bill they introduced because they discovered that Democrats actually thought it was a good idea ...
Then again, this is the party that would vote against a bill they introduced because they discovered that Democrats actually thought it was a good idea ...
Chargone
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- New Zealand
Hell, throw the whole thing out and you'll get popular support in a Lot of countries (you know, at least among the class of people who give a damn about things on that level and aren't the corporations who benefit from its nonsense). The whole thing was a disaster from start to finish. (well, not quite from the Start. It was actually a perfectly reasonable trade deal between a small number of small to medium sized countries which would have been generally beneficial to all concerned to start with... then the USA got in on it somehow and it went to an unbelievable degree of shit...)
*Shrugs* Anyways, this is a game of course and people can do what they like, but as a 'plank' for policy opposing the TPP could be a very popular move. A lot of big-business people couldn't do it for fear of angering their campaign contributors and insiders with a stake in it- Pataki certainly can.
As a fair warning on another plank- nuclear power is a practical solution to a problem. The coal industry is another animal entirely that provides jobs. Nobody is going to out and out say, "screw the environment I want to keep my job and I know nuclear power plants require less people". But they might vote that way.
As a fair warning on another plank- nuclear power is a practical solution to a problem. The coal industry is another animal entirely that provides jobs. Nobody is going to out and out say, "screw the environment I want to keep my job and I know nuclear power plants require less people". But they might vote that way.
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Artemis
What's a pirate's least favourite letter?
- Location
- The Seven Seas
So, talk about new jobs. Talk about transition and re-education opportunities. Talk about fewer deaths, talk about less illness. The environment is and should be a huge factor, but nuclear is still a strong contender in every other area.
- Location
- Vicksburg, MS
I think you misunderstand. Nuclear is great for the environment and for not killing tons of people through avoidable externalities, a huge advantage over coal, but you and all the folks in West Virginia and similar areas both know that they're not all going to become nuclear engineers. Nuclear is one of the very limited group of essentially zero-carbon operating power sources that can actually displace coal in the present day, unlike intermittants.
Valkur
The True Valkyria, Valkur!
- Location
- Fólkvangr
It's also in need of very competant engineers and create fear due to Chernobyl.
I think the impression he gets is that we can spin it. The thing is, spin works for a lot of stuff, but when it's peoples' jobs on the line the spin tends to fizzle a lot more often. You could talk up the benefits in another way - CHEAP power means more manufacturing which means more jobs- but when it comes to the purely pragmatic you aren't going to convince a coal mining town to support nuclear power very easily.
You can only lie about creating jobs for the educated later while actually taking them away from the uneducated so often before people wise up. They may or may not do much about it, and they could be distracted, but they don't really believe the promises of jobs on the horizon. They're not that stupid.
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Artemis
What's a pirate's least favourite letter?
- Location
- The Seven Seas
Fair enough. Can you take a looking to the future approach on this one? I'm sure that most parents would rather have their kids in a better place than they are, no matter where that might be.
...I'm not sure you understand how politics works. Generally, if you're planning to do something people don't like, you just don't tell them about it. Pataki can do what he likes once he's elected.
You're just not going to rally popular support for nuclear power in the Republican party. If Pataki was a Democrat, it might be feasible. But you're running against people in the primaries who are successfully saying global warming is just a big lie. That's what the Coal Belt wants to believe. A presidential election is not a good opportunity to educate them. If Gore couldn't do it with the Dems, doing it with Republicans is laughable.
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Only Ted Cruz stand on his principle...until his little finger personality take over .
Chargone
Invisable operator
- Location
- New Zealand
The only thing which creates new jobs at any great rate is new industry. The only way to get That is to replace imports with local production, and the only way to do That (especially in the face of corporate idiocy that would rather 'outsource' production to other countries) is import tariffs to reduce competition and make outsourcing less profitable. Of course, such must be very carefully regulated, but if properly applied they're highly beneficial.
"free trade" agreements (which usually aren't), tend to be all about removing this sort of thing.
Something like, An industry gets tariffs applied to imported competition provided it meets minimum (much higher than is usual in the USA these days) standards of wages, employment conditions, product quality, and price (a minimum standard of price being a maximum price.) ... Or something. I thought this out ages ago and had all the bases covered, i think, but i've since forgotten most of it.
On the flip side, production subsidies are a disaster. subsidize setup for necessary new industries which, once in place, will be able to survive. Don't subsidize stuff that's going to fail because the market's not there, it's too expensive to run, or the quality's awful. subsidize vital infrastructure like utilities and transport* so long as they meat quality quotas.
It doesn't help that the USA is just too big. You want to apply this thing on a city(and surrounding area) by city basis, ideally. The more cities you have within one 'area', the more one grows at the expense of the others. Notice how most small nations end up with one really big city and a bunch of towns which Used to be significant (before it became practical to transport almost everything to and from the main city)? It's pretty much that.
*actually, if you're half way intelligent**, you nationalize that stuff, or at least have it run by the city or state, because it's rarely particularly profitable while still being particularly useful without screwing over the public, but if you can make it useful it makes everything else more profitable and leaves the public better off. But the USA seems to have something against that idea...
**and the situation is such that it's actually possible.
Seriously, there's books on this stuff... it's just, you know, by way of making life better for the general populous and improving the economy, it tends to screw over big multi national corporations and the like, and encourage a degree of economic decentralization. ... both of which reduce the power of the elite. So, yeah, good luck getting That to happen.
"free trade" agreements (which usually aren't), tend to be all about removing this sort of thing.
Something like, An industry gets tariffs applied to imported competition provided it meets minimum (much higher than is usual in the USA these days) standards of wages, employment conditions, product quality, and price (a minimum standard of price being a maximum price.) ... Or something. I thought this out ages ago and had all the bases covered, i think, but i've since forgotten most of it.
On the flip side, production subsidies are a disaster. subsidize setup for necessary new industries which, once in place, will be able to survive. Don't subsidize stuff that's going to fail because the market's not there, it's too expensive to run, or the quality's awful. subsidize vital infrastructure like utilities and transport* so long as they meat quality quotas.
It doesn't help that the USA is just too big. You want to apply this thing on a city(and surrounding area) by city basis, ideally. The more cities you have within one 'area', the more one grows at the expense of the others. Notice how most small nations end up with one really big city and a bunch of towns which Used to be significant (before it became practical to transport almost everything to and from the main city)? It's pretty much that.
*actually, if you're half way intelligent**, you nationalize that stuff, or at least have it run by the city or state, because it's rarely particularly profitable while still being particularly useful without screwing over the public, but if you can make it useful it makes everything else more profitable and leaves the public better off. But the USA seems to have something against that idea...
**and the situation is such that it's actually possible.
Seriously, there's books on this stuff... it's just, you know, by way of making life better for the general populous and improving the economy, it tends to screw over big multi national corporations and the like, and encourage a degree of economic decentralization. ... both of which reduce the power of the elite. So, yeah, good luck getting That to happen.
...Err, you do realize that nuclear power is more broadly supported among Republicans than it is among Democrats? We discussed this earlier in the thread, when we were deciding on major & minor planks for the platform. Here's a series of Gallup polls showing the base level of support. The current poll numbers are heavily influenced by the recency of the Fukishima nuclear incident (9.0 Richter earthquake + mega-tsunami, and your reactor core only develops a hairline fracture? Damn they over-engineered that sucker for safety. Pity most people didn't see things that way...)
This is all standard economic doctrine... if you're an old-school Keynesian. Which would put you as far out on the fringes of economic discourse as a full-throated Austrian-school anarcho-capitalist.
So no: protectionism is almost universally known and acknowledged as harmful -- to the overall economy (100s of years of data on that one), to domestic consumers (the American worker also has to buy stuff, and if prices are rising due to expensive home-made products...), to even the very industries that are ostensibly protected. After all, if a company grows and develops in an environment where the government 'protects' it from having to compete at all, how can it possible grow & develop to be competitive later on when the government withdraws that protection?
There's a reason that every. single. one. of the early Transcontinental Railroads in the U.S. went bankrupt shortly after the railroad lines were completed. Each one of them was massively funded by the US government, and each one of them was obscenely inefficient and wasteful. When the lines were finished and the gov't withdrew its support, those same railroads realized that despite receiving billions of 2016-equivalent dollars in federal money, they were pathologically incapable of making their business profitable.
You realize this is the Holy Grail of protectionism, right? And just like the Holy Grail, seekers spend way too much time and effort on a futile search for something that doesn't exist. The same problems of knowledge & incentive & corruption & inefficiency that plague the free market, also plague governments, with a few glaring exceptions. When government get it wrong, they don't declare bankruptcy to be replaced by a newer, better competitor that got it right. Also, they can force people to pay for their 'product' thanks to the tax power.
So no: finding a way to ensure that production subsidies or tariffs or quotas or other protectionist policies only target the parts that need it and never target the parts that don't, is the economic equivalent of waving a magical wand over the problem to make it all better. Indeed, one of F.A. Hayek's biggest contributions to economics was demonstrating pretty rigorously that not only was such a task insanely difficult, it was in fact functionally impossible.
The benefit of markets is that they incorporate a massive amount of information in the price structure so that producers & consumers can tell each other what they can supply and what they will buy. It's imperfect because people are imperfect, but it's a damn sight better than the alternative, which is: trying to use a single central entity (a government bureaucracy, or even an incredibly finely calibrated supercomputer) to replicate that same data and same level of informational transfer that is so casually done through the price structure. Only then can you even begin to make decisions that will actually benefit rather than harm the economy.
The problem with nationalizing industry is the same as the problem with protectionism, writ large. The calculation problem, the competition problem... lots of problems. Because nationalized industries typically do one or few things well, and fail utterly to calibrate for every other potential purpose. Hence the Soviet Union could boast of 'full employment' while producing low-quality products that were not particularly in demand -- because their central planners had focused on maximizing employment ('our shoe factory employs the entire town') and failed to account for human capital ('dammit Jim, I'm a bureaucrat, not a shoe designer') or basic supply & demand issues ('turns out people need to eat; any chance our shoes are edible?')
And yes, a badly mismanaged process of de-nationalization can hurt an economy as much as absolute central planning (cf. post-Soviet Russia), but that doesn't mean the original nationalized industry was in any way good or efficient or worth saving. It just means that, no matter how bad a thing gets, never underestimate its ability to somehow get worse.
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Chargone
Invisable operator
- Location
- New Zealand
Fair warning: back and head problems make it harder than usual to be as coherent and logical as I'd like, and I'm already prone to rambling horribly.
@Publicola
You're conflating industry and infrastructure in a couple of places, leading to you either misunderstanding or misrepresenting my point there.
Railroads are Infrastructure. There's good reason to nationalize them, which i partially try to explain further down this post and probably do a terrible job of.
Nationalizing Industries is generally an awful idea unless there are specific circumstances which make it necessary. Certainly trying to control the entire economy using centralized planing is a disaster (how much so depends on the competence and corruption levels of your bureaucracy, among other things, of course, but it's highly unlikely to end well regardless. It might be viable for a city-state, maybe. A complete non-starter for a nation state big enough to count as an Empire!)
Nationalizing Infrastructure (or whatever the city or state equivalent of that is) is often vital. Because a Business set up to run infrastructure has every incentive it could possibly need to provide the lowest quality service at the highest price. More so the more vital it is. Especially as infrastructure tends naturally towards monopoly, not as a function of the free market and corporations, but simply due to matters of scale and efficiency. We have some politicians here who want to privatize our water supplies (currently run by various city, district, or roughly-analogous-to-the-old-provinces-in-size-but-with-more-specialised-jobs local governmental bodies). This is generally viewed with horror and alarm. As it is the water is payed for by way of the rates (functionally a land value tax collected by the local government entities from the landowners), along with local roads, sewers, public libraries, parks, sports and recreation facilities, and various other things like that (not phones or electricity though). They provide good quality service because that raises the value of the land, and gets people to move to the city, or stay there, and stay healthy. All of which lead to more tax money than they'd get otherwise (as well as, you know, being things that they're mandated to do by the national government if they don't want to be dissolved.)... To my understanding, most places with privatized water supplies either have low quality infrastructure (and thus sometimes water), high price, or both. (or most of it gets bottled and sold off, with similar consequences), and even if they don't, if the company which owns it jacked up the price, the locals would have little choice but to pay up, move out, or die. Kind of a problem.
Another issue you bring up (specifically with regard to railways) is a big thing the US seems (from the outside) to do a Lot: Allow a private entity control of a vital area, and then throw tonnes of government money at it. Be horribly surprised when it ends up built to suck in more government money into the pockets of it's owners rather than actually do what it was created for or turn a profit.
I'm not advocating that at all because it is a SHIT SYSTEM.
Either: set it up as a private company. Let it thrive or fail on it's own merits plus or minus sane regulation allowing it to actually achieve what it's meant to and preventing it from screwing over everyone else.
Or: Set it up as a government entity. Acknowledge that while minimizing loss is ideal (and anyone acting contrary to that needlessly has no future in their job), turning a Profit is irrelevant as the purpose is to ensure the service exists. With infrastructure, if it's infrastructure that's actually worth having, managed well, any losses Should be covered by the increase in collected taxes caused by the increase in profit generated for the various industries and individuals the infrastructure serves. With that in mind, if the way a private business would handle, say, it's organizational hierarchy is the best way to do that? do it!
Heck, New Zealand and other countries do quite well with what are termed State Owned Enterprises: They're run like a normal business, except that the government is the only (well, ideally only, sometimes it's just majority due to bad decisions...) shareholder/owner. Meaning the government dictates the policy then the SOE goes and does the job. IF it turns a profit, great! revenue into the coffers. If it doesn't, then you look at why. If it's because of corruption and mismanagement, you fix that. If it's because the service (or sometimes good) it's providing just isn't profitable, you look into how vital or beneficial it is to your economy or nation as a whole. If it's a net benefit despite losing money, you add money in to keep it afloat. This works ENTIRELY because the government itself, the ones adding the money, ARE the owners. They have no incentive to build it to perpetually suck in more money, they want it to need as little additional funding as possible! And, of course, if it's unprofitable to any great extent and offering no particular benefit you shut it down.
Note that, to some extent, keeping large numbers of people employed is a benefit in and of itself, provided the loss is still fairly small. The more people there are who are well payed, the more functional nodes you have in your economic system, the more money moves around, the more it can grow. (for a while here, while there were government pensions and subsidies for illness, injury, old age, etc, if you were just out of work... well, you were generally employed by the (government owned) Railways. The jobs got a little silly sometimes (six or eight guys who's entire job consisted, at least some days, of trundling down the line and repainting certain markings on every single telephone pole along the track, for example), but it kept the people functioning within the economy, meant the railway jobs got done and done well, kept the skills around, and kept the people in question Occupied (also, not problematically poor. )... the modern equivalent is government handouts (they privatized the railways. it was a Disaster. not least because it was bought by an American company who promptly asset stripped the damn thing.) which work for short term unemployment, but socially are worse in a bunch of ways, are an easy target for political attack, and provide less benefit to the country as a whole.
I've lost my original point now <_<
As for protectionism:
All I can say on that note is that the actions supposedly employed to get Rid of it seem to have done more damage to most smaller economies than the protectionism itself ever did. I'm all for Better solutions, of course, but I don't have any and the current system seems highly problematic.
Protectionism certainly Seems to offer solutions, or at least like elements of it would be useful parts of a bigger solution, to a number of current problems.
I freely acknowledge that it comes with it's own problems and i probably don't grasp the full extent of them.
Overspecialization is also disastrous. The current system encourages it to a crippling degree in many case.
What we have now works wonderfully... If you're a multinational corporation, a major trading hub, or able to exploit your work force under conditions best represented by early industrial age British factories (Probably minus most of the smoke). The further away you are from one of those states it is, the worse it works out. Especially for the middle class (compared to what the middle class should be), and lower class worker (which is worse depends on a bunch of stuff), who in the middle of the last century in a lot of the west had it pretty good! ... largely due to a mixture of some protectionism and a whole lot of regulatory control limiting the extreme and predatory behaviour of big businesses and providing safety nets for the citizens.
Yay economics! woo! And such!
Sorry this is kind of a rambly stream of consciousness rant. I'm not really well, but my origional points seemed to be, at least in part, being miss understood, or miss represented. Hopefully this makes some of it make more sense.
doesn't help that i'm very bad at explaining myself or remembering where i got the information i based my conclusions on at the best of times.
Edit the second:
Is this even anywhere near on topic still? i can't tell anymore.
@Publicola
You're conflating industry and infrastructure in a couple of places, leading to you either misunderstanding or misrepresenting my point there.
Railroads are Infrastructure. There's good reason to nationalize them, which i partially try to explain further down this post and probably do a terrible job of.
Nationalizing Industries is generally an awful idea unless there are specific circumstances which make it necessary. Certainly trying to control the entire economy using centralized planing is a disaster (how much so depends on the competence and corruption levels of your bureaucracy, among other things, of course, but it's highly unlikely to end well regardless. It might be viable for a city-state, maybe. A complete non-starter for a nation state big enough to count as an Empire!)
Nationalizing Infrastructure (or whatever the city or state equivalent of that is) is often vital. Because a Business set up to run infrastructure has every incentive it could possibly need to provide the lowest quality service at the highest price. More so the more vital it is. Especially as infrastructure tends naturally towards monopoly, not as a function of the free market and corporations, but simply due to matters of scale and efficiency. We have some politicians here who want to privatize our water supplies (currently run by various city, district, or roughly-analogous-to-the-old-provinces-in-size-but-with-more-specialised-jobs local governmental bodies). This is generally viewed with horror and alarm. As it is the water is payed for by way of the rates (functionally a land value tax collected by the local government entities from the landowners), along with local roads, sewers, public libraries, parks, sports and recreation facilities, and various other things like that (not phones or electricity though). They provide good quality service because that raises the value of the land, and gets people to move to the city, or stay there, and stay healthy. All of which lead to more tax money than they'd get otherwise (as well as, you know, being things that they're mandated to do by the national government if they don't want to be dissolved.)... To my understanding, most places with privatized water supplies either have low quality infrastructure (and thus sometimes water), high price, or both. (or most of it gets bottled and sold off, with similar consequences), and even if they don't, if the company which owns it jacked up the price, the locals would have little choice but to pay up, move out, or die. Kind of a problem.
Another issue you bring up (specifically with regard to railways) is a big thing the US seems (from the outside) to do a Lot: Allow a private entity control of a vital area, and then throw tonnes of government money at it. Be horribly surprised when it ends up built to suck in more government money into the pockets of it's owners rather than actually do what it was created for or turn a profit.
I'm not advocating that at all because it is a SHIT SYSTEM.
Either: set it up as a private company. Let it thrive or fail on it's own merits plus or minus sane regulation allowing it to actually achieve what it's meant to and preventing it from screwing over everyone else.
Or: Set it up as a government entity. Acknowledge that while minimizing loss is ideal (and anyone acting contrary to that needlessly has no future in their job), turning a Profit is irrelevant as the purpose is to ensure the service exists. With infrastructure, if it's infrastructure that's actually worth having, managed well, any losses Should be covered by the increase in collected taxes caused by the increase in profit generated for the various industries and individuals the infrastructure serves. With that in mind, if the way a private business would handle, say, it's organizational hierarchy is the best way to do that? do it!
Heck, New Zealand and other countries do quite well with what are termed State Owned Enterprises: They're run like a normal business, except that the government is the only (well, ideally only, sometimes it's just majority due to bad decisions...) shareholder/owner. Meaning the government dictates the policy then the SOE goes and does the job. IF it turns a profit, great! revenue into the coffers. If it doesn't, then you look at why. If it's because of corruption and mismanagement, you fix that. If it's because the service (or sometimes good) it's providing just isn't profitable, you look into how vital or beneficial it is to your economy or nation as a whole. If it's a net benefit despite losing money, you add money in to keep it afloat. This works ENTIRELY because the government itself, the ones adding the money, ARE the owners. They have no incentive to build it to perpetually suck in more money, they want it to need as little additional funding as possible! And, of course, if it's unprofitable to any great extent and offering no particular benefit you shut it down.
Note that, to some extent, keeping large numbers of people employed is a benefit in and of itself, provided the loss is still fairly small. The more people there are who are well payed, the more functional nodes you have in your economic system, the more money moves around, the more it can grow. (for a while here, while there were government pensions and subsidies for illness, injury, old age, etc, if you were just out of work... well, you were generally employed by the (government owned) Railways. The jobs got a little silly sometimes (six or eight guys who's entire job consisted, at least some days, of trundling down the line and repainting certain markings on every single telephone pole along the track, for example), but it kept the people functioning within the economy, meant the railway jobs got done and done well, kept the skills around, and kept the people in question Occupied (also, not problematically poor. )... the modern equivalent is government handouts (they privatized the railways. it was a Disaster. not least because it was bought by an American company who promptly asset stripped the damn thing.) which work for short term unemployment, but socially are worse in a bunch of ways, are an easy target for political attack, and provide less benefit to the country as a whole.
I've lost my original point now <_<
As for protectionism:
All I can say on that note is that the actions supposedly employed to get Rid of it seem to have done more damage to most smaller economies than the protectionism itself ever did. I'm all for Better solutions, of course, but I don't have any and the current system seems highly problematic.
Protectionism certainly Seems to offer solutions, or at least like elements of it would be useful parts of a bigger solution, to a number of current problems.
I freely acknowledge that it comes with it's own problems and i probably don't grasp the full extent of them.
Overspecialization is also disastrous. The current system encourages it to a crippling degree in many case.
What we have now works wonderfully... If you're a multinational corporation, a major trading hub, or able to exploit your work force under conditions best represented by early industrial age British factories (Probably minus most of the smoke). The further away you are from one of those states it is, the worse it works out. Especially for the middle class (compared to what the middle class should be), and lower class worker (which is worse depends on a bunch of stuff), who in the middle of the last century in a lot of the west had it pretty good! ... largely due to a mixture of some protectionism and a whole lot of regulatory control limiting the extreme and predatory behaviour of big businesses and providing safety nets for the citizens.
Yay economics! woo! And such!
Sorry this is kind of a rambly stream of consciousness rant. I'm not really well, but my origional points seemed to be, at least in part, being miss understood, or miss represented. Hopefully this makes some of it make more sense.
doesn't help that i'm very bad at explaining myself or remembering where i got the information i based my conclusions on at the best of times.
Edit the second:
Is this even anywhere near on topic still? i can't tell anymore.
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- Location
- Leeds
Until the OP says its not then its still the topic.
Shorter version: Nationalize if the benefits of an industry are nationwide, the returns are in the long term, or unlikely to produce direct renumeration if working as intended.
So transportation, power, healthcare, communications, cleaning, waste management, rehabilitation, (some) recreation, etc. Things which improve the wellbeing of the nation and indirectly bolster productivity(and thus tax returns) through consistent services and reduced losses from crime or other human malfunctions.
Never privatize something where the best way to turn a profit is to really suck at it.
So transportation, power, healthcare, communications, cleaning, waste management, rehabilitation, (some) recreation, etc. Things which improve the wellbeing of the nation and indirectly bolster productivity(and thus tax returns) through consistent services and reduced losses from crime or other human malfunctions.
Never privatize something where the best way to turn a profit is to really suck at it.
I think even mentioning a single line from the discussion above this would mark as the "socialist" candidate. In the Republican Party. Not a very good idea, if you ask me.
Also, as someone who has seen the goverment take back things from the private sector, I would say it is a chancy idea at best, outright fuckup at worst. Generally the second.
Also, as someone who has seen the goverment take back things from the private sector, I would say it is a chancy idea at best, outright fuckup at worst. Generally the second.
Okay. I've thought about a way to spin the nuclear issue to the Coal Belt.
Instead of talking about nuclear power as a solution to various ills, simply state that it is likely to become a realistic alernative as the U.S. explores alternate sources of energy- and then talk about how the US mines only 7% of it's uranium internally, and that we do not need to involve ourselves in fights or production of foreign sources of uranium internationally when it can be mined in the US with less worries about our energy being cut off at the source. 'The US should not be dependent on 'foreign uranium, foreign oil, or foreign rare earths.'
The Coal Belt won't exactly be happy about the reminder of alternative energy, but stressing the issue as a need to develop mines and industry domestically in a 'preparing for the future' way will play a LOT better with them than just touting the environmental benefits of nuclear energy. The implication that we'd be interested in encouraging domestic oil is also going to play well with the south.
Instead of talking about nuclear power as a solution to various ills, simply state that it is likely to become a realistic alernative as the U.S. explores alternate sources of energy- and then talk about how the US mines only 7% of it's uranium internally, and that we do not need to involve ourselves in fights or production of foreign sources of uranium internationally when it can be mined in the US with less worries about our energy being cut off at the source. 'The US should not be dependent on 'foreign uranium, foreign oil, or foreign rare earths.'
The Coal Belt won't exactly be happy about the reminder of alternative energy, but stressing the issue as a need to develop mines and industry domestically in a 'preparing for the future' way will play a LOT better with them than just touting the environmental benefits of nuclear energy. The implication that we'd be interested in encouraging domestic oil is also going to play well with the south.
Naturally. Ideology does not allow for practicality.
Though its funny how the party of the Little People tends to do things that benefit Big Business a lot.
Power, water and transport is probably how you do it in the Republican schema safely. All of them employ lots of people and makes it easier for businesses to start and flourish.