Friday, September 23, 2011

BACHMANN TELLS TRAFFIC LIGHT FACTORY SHE WILL STOP GOVERNMENT SPENDING BUT 80% OF THEIR BUSINESS IS GOVERNMENT!


Bachmann Vows To Save Successful Gov’t-Funded Factory From Itself
By KIRSTEN BOYD JOHNSON
Hoo-wee, Michele Bachmann is back in Waterloo, Iowa where she was hatched, spouting as usual just “the complete opposite of whatever is actually the case in reality.” So what this time? Bachmann rambled a righteous yarn about the devilry and downfall of government spending and regulation Monday as she stood promising growth in front of a booming traffic-signal factory, one that is just doing really super well for itself because of the surge in infrastructure repair projects, which, oh hey, who pays for infrastructure projects? Who knows, probably the mystery billionaire fairy nymphs that go around financing public works projects when government red tape isn’t tangled in their wings. Whoever they are, Michele Bachmann is on their team to save this factory (that, again, is doing well despite the downturn).

The company that owns the factory, OMJC, receives about 80% of its revenues from the government, and the company’s chief executive told this to Bachmann. Her response, from the LA Times:

[OMJC CEO Alan] Yost, a conservative Republican, took pains not to spoil Bachmann’s event, playing down his company’s reliance on government spending in a conversation with the candidate.

“So you don’t get a government grant to do what you do?” she asked him.

No grants, he assured her. “I wish I could say we had great success in government funds, because everybody likes a handout,” he said.

“Oh oh oh, so you get government money. Just as long as you aren’t getting a government grant. We’re cool.” It’s from the book called How To Speak Republican, children! [LA Times]

By Michael Finnegan | McClatchy-Tribune News Service

Bachmann uses an example that appears to bolster Obama

WATERLOO, Iowa — On her visit to a traffic-signal plant Monday, Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann called it an example of how President Barack Obama's policies are "continuing to dig us deeper into the hole toward another recession."
Standing before a row of shiny orange trailers carrying portable solar-powered traffic lights, she said her plans for a smaller government with fewer rules and lower spending would help OMJC Signal Inc. "grow, grow, grow, grow, grow."
"That's my goal - to see you succeed wildly," the Minnesota congresswoman told a gathering of OMJC workers on the plant floor here in the central Iowa town where she grew up.
But OMJC thrives on the kind of road and bridge spending that Obama has promoted as a key remedy to the nation's economic slowdown. As much as 80 percent of OMJC's revenue comes from government, according to the company's chief executive, Arlen Yost.
"It is government projects primarily that use our products," Yost told Bachmann after showing her how a crane on one of the orange trailers rises to display temporary traffic signals at road construction sites.
Yost, a conservative Republican, took pains not to spoil Bachmann's event, playing down his company's reliance on government spending in a conversation with the candidate.
"So you don't get a government grant to do what you do?" she asked him.
No grants, he assured her. "I wish I could say we had great success in government funds, because everybody likes a handout," he said.
But in an interview later, Yost acknowledged that his company has profited from the infrastructure spending promoted by the president.
While thousands of other companies have scaled back during the economic downturn, Yost says OMJC's business has been stable, apart from a costly contract dispute with the state of Texas over a road project in the Fort Worth area.
"There's been a lot of money into infrastructure repair; I have no idea how that affects us," he said. "It doesn't do it directly. But it surely does help us."
Bachmann campaign spokesman Eric Woolson said he did not know whether any of the public works spending that Obama is pressing Congress to approve would benefit OMJC. But he cast the president's overall agenda as damaging to the economy.
"The president's health care package, excessive spending, government that's saddling business and individuals with the higher cost of government, that's not helpful to anybody," he said.
OMJC, owned by Yost's family, does government work throughout the U.S., but business has been best recently in East Coast areas where infrastructure has rotted the most, Yost said. In addition to portable traffic lights, its products include solar-powered bus-stop lights and mobile camera systems to monitor traffic.
Michael Finnegan writes for the Los Angeles Times. Visit the Los Angeles Times at www.latimes.com.

Read more: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/09/19/124587/bachmann-uses-an-example-that.html#ixzz1YsNyr94q

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