Blog

The founder of a new apparel company explains how he made it in America.

Dave Johnson

By Dave Johnson
Fellow with Campaign for America’s Future

Congressional Democrats yesterday unveiled the Make It In America plan for the 112th congress. This is a set of specific, detailed, targeted bills that clearly create jobs and restore our economic competitiveness, beginning with a national strategy for manufacturing. This is very different from the vague, sloganeering, lobbyist-written plan offered by Senate Republicans.

Yesterday House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi unveiled their Make It In America plan “to support job creation today and in the future by encouraging businesses to make products and innovate in the US and sell it to the world through strengthening our infrastructure and supporting investments in key areas like education and energy innovation.”

This Make It In America initiative involves a series of bills that have been introduced for consideration by the 112th Congress. This initiative will create jobs here, grow the economy and reduce the trade deficit, all of which help reduce our budget deficits. Creating jobs and growing the economy reduces deficits by increasing tax revenues and decreasing spending on unemployment benefits, food stamps, etc.

Some of the Make It In America bills are:

Currency Reform for Fair Trade Act (Reps. Levin and Tim Ryan, H.R. 639):Levels the trade playing field by holding accountable countries that create an unfair trade advantage by manipulating their currency.

National Manufacturing Strategy Act (Rep. Lipinski, H.R. 1366): Directs the president to work with industry, labor leaders, and other stakeholders to develop a national strategy to increase manufacturing.

Build American Jobs Act (Rep. Levin, H.R. 922)/Build America Bonds to Create Jobs Now Act (Rep. Connolly, H.R. 11): Extends the Build America Bonds program, provides additional funding for the Recovery Zone bonds program, and makes improvements to existing bond and credit programs to help states and local governments leverage private capital to create jobs today and build the infrastructure that is the backbone of future economic growth.

National Infrastructure Development Bank Act (Rep. DeLauro, H.R. 402): Establishes a wholly-owned government corporation to facilitate efficient investments in and financing of infrastructure projects—from leading-edge broadband networks and energy delivery systems to modern ports—that foster economic development and keep America competitive.

Innovative Technologies Investment Incentives Act (Rep. Van Hollen): Accelerates innovation by providing a 25% tax credit for qualified equity investments in eligible high technology and biotechnology small businesses.

Build a 21st Century Surface Transportation System: Enact a Surface Transportation Authorization bill to create a modern and efficient transportation system that facilitates trade and industry.

Workforce Investment Act: Our economy is only as strong as the people who work to grow it. The American workforce investment system is supported by a partnership of educators, workforce development professionals and the business community who work together to ensure the vitality of local economies. A robust reauthorization of WIA will ensure that workers who seek opportunities in a new field or new opportunities within their own field have the support they need.

The Keep American Jobs from Going Down the Drain Act (Rep. Sutton, H.R. 1684): Gives preference to U.S.-made goods and materials for use in the installation, replacement, and improvement of drinking water and wastewater infrastructure projects.

There are clean energy manufacturing, energy efficiency and alternative energy bills, as well.

Specifics, Plans, Details

This is not a vague set of platitudes and lobbyist-written slogans (see below). These are several specific, targeted bills that create jobs and fix problems that have hindered and are hindering job grown and competitiveness.

Whip Hoyer appeared on on CNBC to discuss the Make It In America plan.

And today in a formal unveiling of the plan for the 112th Congress, Hoyer said,

“The Make It In America agenda is about investing in this country’s proud tradition of making things. Make It In America means creating the conditions for companies to make products here, innovate here, and hire workers here—and the conditions for America to have the best-trained workforce in the world. This agenda is founded on the conviction that when we make more products in America, more families will be able to Make It In America, as well.”

The Republican Plan

Senate Republicans Tuesday released their own plan. Apparently transcribed from a Chamber of Commerce lobbyist memo of slogan suggestions, they say their plan will boost the economy. See if you can guess what their plan is. Hint: the same plan that “boosted the economy” from 2001-2009: tax cuts for the rich, get rid of unions, get rid of consumer and employee protections and other points that led to a decade of no job growth, low economic growth, wage decline, corruption, concentration of income at the very top and culminated in a financial collapse that brought the world’s economy down and left us with extreme unemployment and trillion-plus deficits. They have a Seven-Point-Plan to do all that again, but more.

Here is the Seven-Point-Plan, translated from lobbyist wording to regular English:

Cut taxes for the rich

Cut regulations that protect consumers, employees and the environment

Cut spending on the things We, the People (government) do for each other, including spending on infrastructure and education

Get rid of unions

More trade agreements to increase offshoring

Unleash oil companies to do whatever they want, including more unregulated drilling in the Gulf of Mexico

Block citizen access to courts for redress when corporations harm them

Unleash big insurance companies and block states from regulating them

Compare the specific detailed set of bills offered in the Make It In America plan with the Seven-Point-Plan offered by Senate Republicans. Seriously, click through and read the Republican “plan.” And check the link to see for yourself that it really isn’t another parody put out by the Onion.

Make It A Movement

The Hill’s Brent Budowsky, in Made in 
the USA, says we need a Make It In America movement,

Let’s begin a national wave movement for Americans to buy American products, sold by American companies, made by American workers, to create American jobs and lift the American economy.

Tired of high unemployment, exported jobs, big deficits and low wages? Here is the answer. Let’s kick some butt, take some names, wave some flag and rise as a nation to buy some products made by red, white and blue American workers!

Throughout the land there is a fervent patriotism waiting to be tapped and a patriotic capitalism waiting to be born to lift the nation and mobilize Americans, from Tea Party voters to union workers, from the inner-city poor to rural America, from small businesses to American women and our veteran heroes.

Click through to read the rest — some of the comments are great, too.

***

Johnson also is a fellow at the Commonweal Institute and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for the Renewal of the California Dream.

***

Follow Dave Johnson on Twitter: www.twitter.com/dcjohnson

***

This post originally appeared at Campaign for America’s Future (CAF) at their Blog for OurFuture. Sign up here for the CAF daily summary.

Dave Johnson

By Dave Johnson
Fellow with Campaign for America’s Future

Last week, in Jobs: It’s BOLD PLAN Time, I listed three badly-needed plans for creating jobs:

* A 5-year plan to revive American manufacturing. This is how our country and our people can make a living again.
* A 5-year plan to bring America’s infrastructure into the 21st century, making our economy competitive again.
* A 5-year plan to make our homes, buildings and electric grid energy efficient to lower our energy costs and reduce our imports of oil.

I wrote:

These are things that we have to do anyway. We have a lot of unemployed people, and any one of these three plans will put a huge dent in unemployment. Any one of these three revives our economy. Any one of these three restores American competitiveness. ALL THREE restore us as the economy leader in the world.

And, the politics will be good because it is what is needed and good for the country and everyone knows it. (more…)

Leo W. Gerard

By Leo W. Gerard
USW International President

Like the clear results on a pH test strip, the vote in the U.S. Senate this week on the Creating American Jobs and Ending Off-Shoring Act showed Republicans’ true color: Red. Red for China.

Or Mexico. Or Indonesia. Or anywhere multi-national corporations get tax breaks for exporting American jobs. In this test of loyalty, every Republican in the Senate voted for corporate greed over American workers.

No fluke, this is a GOP pattern. The red party has consistently sided with giant corporations to the detriment of the American economy and American workers. In voting against health care reform, Republicans chose giant health insurance corporations over uninsured Americans. In opposing financial reform, Republicans embraced Wall Street over the taxpayers who bailed out the big banks and don’t want to do it again.

Republicans vainly attempted to rationalize those votes as opposing government regulation. There’s no regulation issue in the Creating American Jobs and Ending Off-Shoring Act.

That Act would have removed tax incentives the U.S. government gives corporations to close domestic factories, fire American workers and move production overseas. And, conversely, the Act would have instituted tax cuts for corporations that return foreign employment to U.S. soil.

Every Republican in the Senate voted against the Act. They voted to continue forcing Americans to give tax breaks to corporations that ship jobs overseas during the worst recession since the Great Depression. The GOP said it is right and proper for U.S. citizens to subsidize corporate killing of American manufacturing. And Republicans said it would be wrong to do the opposite — to use tax breaks to encourage corporations to restore off-shored jobs to the U.S.

Democrats, whose first priority is American workers, are pushing a 17-bill Make it in America plan. The Creating American Jobs and Ending Off-Shoring Act is part of that effort to bolster domestic industry and employment.

With joblessness stuck at 9.6 percent and with the U.S. trade deficit destroying or displacing 5.6 million jobs — 70 percent of them good-paying manufacturing jobs — in just one year – 2007, Democrats developed this plan to preserve American industry and jobs. Recent surveys of likely voters suggest the Democrats’ Make it in American program is exactly what Americans want and believe the country needs.

In a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll released earlier this week, 86 percent of respondents cited corporate off-shoring of American jobs as the primary cause of the country’s continuing economic distress.

Similarly, a bi-partisan polling team that conducted a survey of likely voters for the Alliance for American Manufacturing in April found large majorities believe manufacturing strength is crucial to U.S. economic security and that the government should fortify American industry. These voters told the pollsters that they believe America no longer leads the world in manufacturing but could again with proper support.

That can-do-it attitude is realistic. Already some manufacturers are on-shoring. General Electric is moving production of its energy-efficient water heaters from China to the United States. Caterpillar and NCR, a technology company, are doing the same. A survey in June found 21 percent of North American manufacturers brought production into or closer to the United States in the previous three months and another 38 percent planned to research such a move.

Manufacturers gave USA Today numerous reasons for this repatriation. Chinese wages and shipping costs have risen. They cited poor quality foreign manufactured goods; theft of intellectual property; long product delivery times interfering with response to consumer demand, and benefits from providing engineers easy access to assembly lines.

The trade publication, Supply Chain Digest, quoted two experts in an August story about the on-shoring trend:

“George Stalk, a consultant at Boston Consulting Group, has led research efforts showing the inventory benefits for high margin, fashion-oriented goods from bringing production at least back to North America almost always trump the value of lower manufacturing costs in Asia. Those benefits come from both not losing sales from being out of stock and not getting stuck with obsolete inventory that a company can’t sell or must mark down dramatically.”

And, the story quoted Jeremy Leonard, a consultant for Manufacturers Alliance/MAPI:

“A lot of companies who have gone there to take advantage of cheap labor are starting to tell us that if you (calculate) total cost and don’t just look at wages, it’s actually not worth it.”

Democrats sought to nurture and expand the repatriation trend. But like numerous Make it in America bills passed by the U.S. House, the Creating American Jobs and Ending Off-Shoring Act died at the hands of Senate Republicans. Democrats had the majority with 53 votes for the measure, but Republicans, as they have all year, blocked passage by using a filibuster to require a super-majority of 60.

The next test for Republicans will occur Nov. 2. In the mid-term election, Americans red-in-the-face angry at the GOP for extending tax breaks to corporations for expatriating American jobs have the opportunity to show Republican politicians what it feels like to lose a job.

***

Leo W. Gerard also is a member of the AFL-CIO Executive Committee and chairs the labor federation’s Public Policy Committee. President Barack Obama recently appointed him to the President’s Advisory Committee on Trade Policy and Negotiations. He serves as co-chairman of the BlueGreen Alliance and on the boards of the Apollo Alliance, Campaign for America’s Future and the Economic Policy Institute.  He is a member of the IMF and ICEM global labor federations and was instrumental in creating Workers Uniting, the first global union.

Dave Johnson

By Dave Johnson
Fellow with Campaign for America’s Future

Addressing the AFL-CIO Executive Council yesterday, President Obama signaled support for the new Congressional “Make It In America” initiative, saying,

“As long as I’m president, I’m going to keep fighting night and day to make sure that we win those jobs, that those are jobs that are created right here in the United States of America — (applause) — and that your members are put to work.

So the message I want to deliver to our competitors and to those in Washington who’ve tried to block our progress at every step of the way is that we are going to rebuild this economy stronger than before. And at the heart of it are going to be three powerful words: Made in America. (Applause.) Made in America.”

A Washington Post story, New Democratic strategy for creating jobs focuses on a boost in manufacturing, explains,

President Obama and congressional Democrats — out of options for another quick shot of stimulus spending to revive the sluggish economy — are shifting toward a longer-term strategy that promises to tackle persistently high unemployment by engineering a renaissance in American manufacturing.

That approach, heralded by Obama last week in Detroit and sketched out in a memo to House Democrats as they headed home for the August break, is still evolving and so far focuses primarily on raising taxes on multinational corporations that Democrats accuse of shipping jobs overseas.

The strategy also repackages policies long pursued by the White House — such as investing in clean energy, roads, bridges and broadband service — with more than two dozen legislative proposals aimed at developing a plan for promoting domestic manufacturing. (more…)

Dave Johnson

By Dave Johnson
Fellow with Campaign for America’s Future

House leaders deserve praise for fighting for working people by launching a “Make It In America” initiative which they officially unveiled this week. 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 these important bills made it to the House floor: (click through for details)

• National Manufacturing Strategy Act
• Clean Energy Technology Manufacturing and Export Assistance Act
• End the Trade Deficit Act (more…)

Robert Borosage

By Robert L. Borosage
Co-Director Campaign for America’s Future

Washington is enmeshed in the economic version of the phony war. The two sides have declared war on one another, but neither has faced up to the fierce battles yet to come. Too few seem aware of the staggering challenges that face this country.

Here is a summary of the carnage wrought by the Great Recession summarized by the Economist from a Pew study (H/T to nakedcapitalism.com):

More than half of all workers have experienced a spell of unemployment, taken a cut in pay or hours or been forced to go part-time. The typical unemployed worker has been jobless for nearly six months. Collapsing share and house prices have destroyed a fifth of the wealth of the average household. Nearly six in ten Americans have cancelled or cut back on holidays. About a fifth say their mortgages are underwater. One in four of those between 18 and 29 have moved back in with their parents. Fewer than half of all adults expect their children to have a higher standard of living than theirs, and more than a quarter say it will be lower.. for many Americans the great recession has been the sharpest trauma since the second world war, wiping out jobs, wealth and hope itself.

Stop and consider the implications. Then add the fact that continuing high levels of unemployment are now the consensus forecast. Long term unemployment will remain at record levels. In the U.S., where we provide only temporary support for the unemployed, this is a social catastrophe. Families break apart; drug use and despair increase; community institutions decline; domestic violence, racial and anti-immigrant hostility soar. The young graduating into this economy are likely to fare worse throughout their work lives. (more…)