Instead Of TARP And Stimulus: What If The U.S. Had Paid Off Its Debt To China?

As a conservative, I am appalled at the way that our government has chosen to waste citizens tax dollars to bail out the car companies and the banks. I was also against the stimulus package passed by Congress in February. I believe that the government should not interfere in the free market. If a company makes bad decisions then that company should have to live with the consequences. Why should our tax dollars be used to help out a company that made bad decisions? If I made a bad decision and found myself in debt, would the government bail me out? I highly doubt it. Nor do I think that the government should. The stimulus money was meant to stimulate the economy and increase the number of jobs in the U.S. Most of the money in the stimulus package went to special interest groups and their projects and the money did not go toward shovel ready jobs. Some states didn’t even know how they were going to use their portion of stimulus dollars. The American people were told that shovel ready jobs were waiting to be completed and that the money was needed to hire workers, but that wasn't true. Are there more projects being completed in your area? I don’t see any big increases, if at all, with regard to shovel ready jobs in the Pittsburgh area.

In searching on the internet I found out on Wikianswers.com that as of April 6, 2008 the United States owes China $492 billion. Then, by coincidence today Stuart Varney from the Fox Business Network stated that China owns $763 billion of U.S. Treasury debt. That means that the United States owes at least that amount of money to China. The U.S. government has spent $787 billion on the Stimulus Bill and about $700 billion was on TARP. What if the U.S. had used the money we spent on both TARP and the Stimulus Bill and paid off our debt to China? Would that have been a good idea? Then the U.S. would not be beholden to China. Would that allow the U.S. to have more opportunities in the trading market? If the United States had paid off its debt to China then the U.S. could have started producing more made in the U.S.A. goods and exporting them. I believe that this could have created new jobs. I think that the U.S. should still trade with China but it seems to me that now the U.S. is mainly buying and importing cheap goods from China. It seems like the United States is not exporting nearly as many products as it was 40 or 50 years ago. Do you think that China would stop trading with the U.S. if we paid our debt to them? Would paying off the debt to China hurt the U.S. economy? I think it would benefit the U.S. if the United States paid off the debt that we owe China.