During the Trump Era, businesses flocked back to the US and started investing in the heartland again. New businesses cropped up, factories expanded, and the economy boomed thanks to all the new investments.
Unfortunately, as shown by the fact that US Steel is canceling a $1.5 billion investment thanks to Democrat regulations, Biden and his cronies refused to stick with those time-tested policies.
Rather than stick to the magic formula of economic success, one that has worked since before the West adopted capitalism, the Democrats eschewed decades of evidence that regulations stifle commerce and industry and cracked down on a US Steel project.
Here’s what American Greatness reports was meant to take place and would have had the Democrats not torpedoed it:
“Exactly two years ago, U.S. Steel Corporation announced that the company would turn its Mon Valley Works operations into a key source of lightweight steel for the automotive industry….
…It involved a whopping $1.5 billion upgrade to the three Mon Valley Works plants, all in Pennsylvania—the Edgar Thomson Plant in Braddock, the Irvin Plant in West Mifflin, and the Clairton Coke Works in Clairton—with technology and improvements that would have resulted in cleaner air for all three communities as well as good-paying jobs providing regional prosperity for decades.”
Unfortunately, it was not going to happen. The Democrats in the town didn’t care about economic development or the lives of the working men and women that were depending on the new plants for jobs.
Nope, they’re okay with the fact that US Steel is canceling a $1.5billion investment in Mon Valley because everything they do is premised on the idea that industrial development means the angry sun monster might make things hotter here on Earth. Instead of thinking rationally about the project, they shot it down to fight “climate change.”
Again according to American Greatness, here are the details on that:
“On April 30, U.S. Steel said that after months of tug of war with the Allegheny County Health Department, it was canceling the $1.5 billion upgrade and idling three batteries at Clairton Coke Works by 2023...
Local economic development forecasters estimate over 1,000 direct jobs will be lost, as well as countless supporting jobs that would have facilitated the buildout.”
US Steel, in a statement, said this about canceling what would have been a $1.5 billion investment:
“We commissioned the manufacturing of the equipment and began site preparations. However, with over $170 million invested and equipment being stored in Pittsburgh-area warehouses, we’re still only at the beginning stages of project execution. By contrast, during this same time period, a competing steel manufacturer in another state announced a new steel mill and will be ready to make steel this year. [Emphasis added]
A lot has changed in those two years. At the onset of the pandemic, U. S. Steel agreed with the need for the County Health Department to temporarily delay its permitting process for the Mon Valley Works, but this delay allowed for a consequential window of time during which we expanded our understanding of steelmaking’s future in a rapidly decarbonizing world. The world is changing rapidly and we’re on the ten-yard line with 90 yards ahead of us.”
The bolded areas hint at the truth about what happened. Whatever the rest of the statement says, the real reason that US Steel is canceling a $1.5 billion investment in the Mon Valley Works is that the climate-obsessed bureaucrats wouldn’t approve the project on a reasonable timeline.
“State Sen. Kim Ward (R-PA) wrote in a series of posts that Allegheny County officials had kowtowed “to the extreme environmental groups without actually looking at the facts or consider the fall out.”
“What happened today is the result of local government leaders letting radical environmental groups like PennFuture, GASP and Breathe PA, funded in part by elitist Pittsburgh Foundations, bully them into abandoning blue collar workers,” Ward wrote.”
As a result, thousands of jobs have been lost, the air won’t get cleaner, and US Steel will continue to lose out to foreign competitors. Democrats, with their insane policies and climate obsession, are destroying the American economy.
By: Gen Z Conservative. Follow me on Parler, Gab, and Facebook
Image at top from WPXI 11 news
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