What’s the No. 1 issue in America today? Jobs.
What do all presidential candidates claim they can create? Jobs.
So why aren’t Americans using more domestic natural gas as a transportation fuel?
That’s the question a leading economist is asking. University of Maryland business professor Peter Morici is a former chief economist at the U.S. International Trade Commission. Like T. Boone Pickens, Morici sees every hard-earned American dollar that ends up going overseas to purchase goods and services as an impediment to our country’s economic recovery. Instead of serving as a catalyst to the American economy, expenditures on foreign goods have negligible impact.
This is especially the case with Chinese consumer goods and foreign oil, which account for almost the entire U.S. trade deficit.
“The trade deficit is the most significant barrier to jobs creation and growth in the US economy,” Morici wrote in a commentary for Dow Jones Newswires. “Simply, the U.S. economy suffers from too little demand for what Americans make, and every dollar that goes abroad to purchase oil or Chinese consumer goods that does not return to purchase exports is lost purchasing power that could be creating jobs.”
One of Morici’s possible solutions is a principal tenet of the Pickens Plan, namely, the use of natural gas for fleet vehicles. According to Morici, if Washington fails to show some leadership and address this issue, then America will remain mired in these economic doldrums for quite some time:
“The failure of both the Bush and Obama administrations to develop abundant domestic oil and gas resources and address subsidized Chinese imports are major barriers to pulling down unemployment to acceptable levels.”