Doug Palmer reports that House and Senate leaders had agreed on a large set of changes in U.S. Trade Adjustment Assistance programs to be included in the stimulus bill.: Lawmakers agree to expand trade adjustment aid:
The proposal reauthorizes the TAA program through the end of 2010 and increases funds for worker training by nearly 160 percent to $575 million.
It triples funding to $50 million for a program that helps business cope with foreign competition and authorizes $230 million to help mostly small and medium-sized communities adjust to trade-related job losses.
The reforms also allow coverage for workers whose companies have shifted production to China, India and other countries, even if they do not a have trade pact with the United States which previously had been the requirement.
Hat tip to Jonathan Dingel at Trade Diversion.
On a different topic, this is a concern: Palmer also reports (Congress agrees on "strong" Buy American plan) that:
As of Thursday evening, congressional appropriations committees with jurisdiction over the Buy American provision still had not released details of the final version.
But apparently Congress will be voting on it Friday (Congress readies final vote on $790B stimulus bill):
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Friday that Congress is nearly finished with a massive, $790 billion economic stimulus plan giving President Barack Obama a big victory, but not everything he wanted.
The Nevada Democrat said as debate resumed that the Senate would likely vote on the package of spending and tax cuts later in the day and that both the Senate and House would do the work necessary to quickly get the emergency legislation to Obama's desk.
If the national emergency is so great that this can't wait until early next week, why didn't Congress act last fall? What odd things are we going to find in there as time passes?
Feb 15: Clive Crook - who thinks the bill that passed was better than no action - points to some of the items we're beginning to find: Fiscal stimulus: repent at leisure:
It will be interesting to see what is hiding in those 1,400 pages. Some disturbing early discoveries have already been reported. For instance, the bill appears to reverse or at any rate undermine the Clinton welfare reforms. It appears to ban the hiring of skilled immigrants in much of the finance industry. It appears to cap finance-industry pay much more aggressively than the Obama administration has proposed. Even if you don’t think these ideas are harmful or unworkable or both, as I do, you have to admit that they deserved more of an airing than they received–which is virtually none–before they became law.
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