Betty Sutton

One of Congresswoman Sutton’s pet projects has been a push to include ‘Buy America’ language in the house Jobs Bill (H.R. 2847).  Through this, Sutton hopes to create and protect American jobs.  For the moment, I’ll leave aside the opinions of experts and historians who disagree with this approach and believe it will ultimately do more harm than good.   Instead, I want to concentrate on our representative’s commitment to this philosophy.

Last year, on NPR, speaking of her Buy American Provisions, Sutton said,

“It just ensures that American tax dollars are supporting American workers doing the work that we need to have done.”

More recently, on December 16, 2009, Sutton published a press release to her official website in which she said the following,

“At a time when unemployment is at 10 percent in this country, it is critical now more than ever that we stand with American workers and businesses.  As we invest in our nation’s infrastructure and manufacturing, the American taxpayers expect that the projects and products made will be produced in America by American workers.”

If, as Sutton believes, keeping federal tax dollars within our national borders is a positive move for American workers, then it would stand to reason that buying goods and services from the 13th district of Ohio would be good for the worker of the district.

Practice What You Preach

It was not long ago that Betty took $118,838 of your tax dollars to produce a pair of self-promoting mailings.  The publishing company chosen by Sutton to complete this controversial task was the Mount Vernon Printing Company.  For those of you following along at home, the Mount Vernon Printing Company is located in Landover, MD (MD-4).

Certainly, with only a small amount of research, Sutton’s staff could have located a printing company within the borders of Ohio’s thirteenth district. Instead, the Congresswoman took nearly $120,000 which had been entrusted to her, as the representative of OH-13, and spent it to support her own campaign and the workers of Maryland’s 4th district.  This was done at a time when Ohio’s unemployment rate has nearly topped 11 percent.

You cannot have it both ways, Betty.  If your ideas are good, then enact them in your own daily work.

Knowing how busy you have been I decided to save you some work and have drafted a “Buy OH-13” plan for you:

1. All business transactions completed by your offices will follow a strict “Buy OH-13” policy.
2. If a project or purchase must be completed by a company from outside our district, then you must publish on the Internet within 30 days a detailed, written justification as to why the product or service cannot be completed by an OH-13 business.  It will also be necessary for you to including the amount of tax dollars being spent.
3. For any wavier to this plan, you shall provide, as part of the written justification, a statement detailing the short and long term impacts of the waiver on OH-13 employment.
4. You can request a waiver based on “unavailability/insufficient district source” only if after publishing your request on the Internet for at least 5 business days a sufficient OH-13 source of the material, product, or service does not identify itself during the period.

My plan will slow down the work of your offices, and I understand that it is an inefficient and expensive way to conduct business, however, as my grandmother use to say,

“ What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.”

Tags: issues, jobs, OH-13, Tax

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 11th, 2010 at 10:51 pm and is filed under Spending. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.