Bravo To Congress' Making It In America Push -- What It Still Needs

House leaders deserve praise for fighting for working people by launching a "Make It In America" initiative [1] which they officially unveiled today. The country still badly needs an immediate job-creation effort, but this is a very important longer-term initiative for reviving America's manufacturing base and restoring our competitiveness in the world economy. Good work!

Manufacturing is the core of our country's income. Making things that we sell is how we earn money to buy things that others make. This is why it is so important to restore America's manufacturing base and the infrastructure that supports it. People want to go into a store and have a choice to buy things that are made here.

This week [2] these important bills made it to the House floor: (click through for details)

As the Congress rolls out this initiative here are important components it should include:


Buy American

Public money should be going to our people. This is what other countries, like China, are doing with domestic preferences and "indigenous innovation" policies.

Trade policies

(Is "trade" even the right word [6] for making the same things in other countries that we used to make here.)

We are doing very little to combat the mercantilist nations, in particular China and Germany. China manipulates its currency and will not match its exports with imports. Germany is limiting domestic consumption -- the resulting trade surplus is out of balance.

Encourage the "Green Economy"

Stimulate American manufacture of wind turbines, solar panels, biofuels, etc. This creates jobs and makes us competitive in the new green economy [7] that will replace the carbon economy.

Infrastructure

Our roads, bridges, rail, water and electrical systems, etc. are the backbone of a competitive economy. The infrastructure enables business to thrive. If it is not kept in good working order and up-to-date (and it has not been), businesses do not thrive (and they aren't).

This is a brief outline of some of the needed components in a Make It In America strategy. These are things that Congress can do. Congress must not back away from bold reforms in the face of resistance from the right-wing monopolist business lobbyists, who speak for the job exporters, and their "free-trade ideologue" allies.