Copenhagen: U.S. and China

My first blog ever was about the UN Global warming summit, and one of my last blogs is going to me the Copenhagen talks.  There seems to be a connection between the two other then the whole environment issue, China and the United States are battling it out.  Todd Stern started out strong by immediately demanding that China make huge cuts on its carbon emission.  He did not have any mercy for their “developing country” status.

Sterns vowed that the United States emissions have started to flatten out, and promised that they will go down.  An idea was purposed that American taxpayers should help pay for China’s plan for emission reduction.  While he did not support our taxpayers paying for China’s plan for carbon emission reduction, he said that America would be more willing to support poor developing nations plans to reduce their carbon emissions.

America so far has planned to cut emissions by 17% from the 2005 carbon emission rates.  The 17% cut is an ambitious goal, and is admirable.  The only issue is that there does not seem to be a sure way as to how the United States is going to achieve that goal.  There have been all different kinds of ideas thrown out there, but not single one has been settled on.

President Obama’s most recent idea is tied up in his job program plan.  He wants to use some of the $200 billion dollars in the TARP fund to help create jobs in clean energy.  While the idea has merit, there is currently a huge debate over what should be done with that money.

TARP

What should we do with TARP?  First of TARP stands for Troubled Asset Relief Program, and is a program that was set in place as part of Congress’ Emergency Economic Stabilization Act. The money in the TARP fund is what is driving the news recently.  Obama wants to use the TARP money in part of a $200 billion jobs program.  However others would like to see this money used to help to start pay back the national deficit.

Obama’s job program would stimulate jobs in only three areas of our economy: small business, clean energy, and infrastructure.  All of this of course has to pass through congress first, and I am not sure if it will go straight through.

Rather than use the money on a job program, I think the best plan would be to use the money to start to pay back our national debt.  I feel like if the money is used for a jobs program right now, it’s just a quick fix kind of solution that can have more harmful implications further down the line.  Eventually we would have to pay that money back anyway.  Our economy is slowly rebounding from the recession, and eventually it should stabilize again.  I do not think that the recovering job market necessarily needs a job program boost.  There is no doubt that with sending more troops into Afghanistan, and the new health care bill that our country will be in more national debt later down the road.  Shouldn’t we try to pay what we can now?