Earlier this week Commerce Secretary Gary Locke descended on Louisiana to announce a $30.7 million grant for a coastal restoration project near Port Fourchon. He called the funding a sign of the “administration’s commitment to help the Gulf Coast’s economy and environment recover in the wake of the BP oil spill.” There was just one problem — funding for the project was approved months before the oil spill. And according to the state agency in charge of coastal restoration, there was no action even necessary by the Department of Commerce …
Last week, Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke delivered a speech at the National Press Club titled “Back to Basics: A Blueprint for Exports-Driven Job Growth,” and remarked that “[President Obama’s National Export Initiative] will correct an economic blind spot that has allowed other countries to chip away at America’s international competitiveness.” The secretary also stated that “The United States is the most open major economy in the world…And that’s not going to change!” Well, unfortunately, “empirical reality” tells us a different story. According to the 2010 Index of Economic Freedom, …
President Obama’s Secretary of Commerce, Gary Locke, rolled out the administration’s new “National Export Initiative (NEI)” today at the National Press Club. The way Secretary Locke described it, the NEI sounds like a great vehicle to create jobs—government jobs. Secretary Locke began by saying that the “NEI represents the first time the United States will have a government-wide export-promotion strategy with focused attention from the president and his Cabinet,” ignoring the prior administration’s success in negotiating free trade agreements with more than a dozen countries between 2001 and 2009. NEI’s …
