Bon Voyage, Manufacturing? (Op-Ed)

Industry Today  (Tonelson) - Manufacturing must once again create enough wealth to pay for the whole society’s affluence without the need for reckless borrowing.

Reading President Obama’s Framework for Revitalizing American Manufacturing makes three conclusions all too clear. First, the president doesn’t understand the main economic reason for revitalizing domestic manufacturing (as opposed to the political reasons – mainly throwing a few real and rhetorical crumbs to his union supporters). Second, knowing nothing about the stakes involved in reindustrialization, the president has no sense of the sector’s most important weaknesses, and how serious they remain. Finally, the president’s ignorance about manufacturing’s real significance has inevitably produced a revitalization program certain to fail – and to deepen the economic crisis even further.

In normal times, this Obama manufacturing policy blueprint might merit a Gentleman’s C. It competently but perfunctorily summarizes the recent, bromide-level conventional wisdom about manufacturing among middle-of-the-road Democrats. And it proposes to overcome the sector’s “enormous challenges” through modestly expanding Bush (the first!) and Clinton-era tax, worker retraining, and technology promotion programs, tweaking Bush (I and II) and Clinton-era American trade policy, and a government mid-wifing of those exhilarating but still largely theoretical mainstays of the Obama worldview – wholly new green industries and greener existing industries (mainly steel autos) large enough eventually to supplant most of the nation’s current manufacturing complex.
In addition, the Framework’s smorgasbord of wonkishly pragmatic mini-steps topped with a dollop of futurism could plausibly accomplish its mission if its target was just one portion of the economy out of many, and simply needed a little extra TLC to regain its mojo. But the times today of course are anything but normal, and manufacturing is not just another brick in our economic wall. 

... In all, the President’s manufacturing Framework may ultimately be remembered most for providing future scholars and analysts with a truly delicious irony: When it came to the early 21st century manufacturing scene, what most needed revitalization and reeducation and retraining were not America’s industries but its political leaders.