Can Obama save manufacturing?
By Zachary A. Goldfarb, Washington Post, 7/14/12
As he campaigns for reelection, President Obama has embraced soaring political rhetoric, pledging to harness the ingenuity of America “to bring manufacturing back.” In beat-up factory towns across the land, he has promoted a vision to rebuild manufacturing after decades of shuttered plants and vanishing middle class jobs.
But he wasn’t always so sure. Three years ago, confronting the issue in an Oval Office debate, Obama was less of the chest-thumping politician he is today. Vice President Biden led a group of advisers who were making the case for an ambitious plan to reverse the industry’s long decline.
Obama had witnessed the devastation of lost factory jobs from his earliest days as a community activist in Chicago and felt in his gut that there must be some way to help, but the president, a policy wonk and onetime professor, also wanted to know what the research showed.
(...)
Today, Obama has settled that conflict in favor of manufacturing, a decision explained by politics, economics and the president’s trust in his own instincts, according to interviews with more than 30 current and former Obama advisers and others who’ve worked with the White House on manufacturing.
As he mulled whether to adopt policies to try to reverse manufacturing’s long decline, critics said, Obama risked allowing even more jobs to go overseas. The vast majority of manufacturing jobs lost in the recession have not come back — and today there are still fewer jobs in the sector than when Obama took office.
But now Obama is a man on a mission, pursuing major tax breaks for manufacturers, loans to help sell manufactured goods overseas, tougher trade enforcement to protect U.S. industries from foreign competition, investments in clean energy, high-tech manufacturing clusters and a range of other policies.
full: http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/can-obama-save-manufacturing/2012/07/13/gJQAe2zxhW_singlePage.html
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The main U.S. economic problem is NOT how much the U.S. produces relative to other countries.
Find where I said that was our main economic problem.
The main U.S. economic problem is the fact that a gigantic proportion of what Americans consume that could, and should be, manufactured here, is made in other countries and imported here by "borrowing" money from the countries that sell us the stuff. This problem is popularly known as the trade deficit, and it is a much bigger problem for the U.S. than the government deficits.
We borrow money from other countries to fund our government deficits. Trade deficits work a bit differently.
As for automation being the main cause of American unemployment, the sweat shops in China, such as FoxConn, and in India, Vietnam, and in U.S. prisons, belie that claim.
I never said it was the main cause of all unemployment in the US. I said increased productivity was responsible for declines in employment in manufacturing.
The loss of manufacturing in the U.S. is mainly due to the cartel agreements devised by the largest corporations to divide the world into fiefdoms to prevent competition in manufacturing and trade.
Yeah I'm sure it has nothing to do with this:
Rewrite the tax code and renegotiate the trade agreements to enable American manufacturers who want to produce goods here a chance to compete, and the most serious American economic problems will eventually disappear.
So we should "spend" our money (via tax breaks and incentives) to ensure that everything is produced internally?
That is known as an autarky and there is not a single industrialized modern nation that has practiced it successfully:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autarky
Why do you think we trade at all if we could simply produce everything here? Because it works out to be cheaper to let others specialize in some things so we can focus on other areas where we do better.
