Biden bets big on bringing factories back to America, building on some Trump ideasWhen the pandemic snarled imports in 2020, Drew Greenblatt's manufacturing plant in Baltimore sprung into action to help U.S. buyers scrambling to replace things they normally ordered from overseas.
"We started making IV poles," said Greenblatt, the president of Marlin Steel Wire Products, where giant American flags loom over workers who cut, bend and weld steel into racks and wire baskets. "We also started making things like the sanitizer stands where you put your hand underneath the little soap dispenser – that stopped coming in from overseas. Test tube racks stopped coming in from overseas."
The supply chain snafus seen across the U.S. economy during the pandemic have bolstered a central plank of President Biden's economic policy: he says that now is the time to invest in America, make things in America, and buy things made in America.
Biden's vision is for the government to lure back manufacturing that moved offshore, particularly semiconductors and electric vehicles.
"Folks, where is it written that America can't once again be the manufacturing capital of the world?" Biden said on a tour earlier this month of a Cummins plant in Minneapolis that makes a device used to produce clean power..................
...............In Baltimore, Greenblatt said he is pleased that Biden is, in his words, "following" some of former President Donald Trump's policies – policies he said are also smart politics.
"Whoever can get more factories growing faster in America is gonna win a lot of votes," Greenblatt said...............
............Trump campaigned on ripping up trade deals and bringing back manufacturing – a message that resonated with white working-class voters – and as president, slapped massive tariffs on products coming from China.
"We want to ensure that more products are proudly stamped with the phrase – that beautiful phrase – made in the USA," Trump said in Oct. 2020 in Allentown, Pa., a refrain he used again and again at his rallies.
Biden has thus far kept Trump's China tariffs in place.
"You could cut and paste some of Trump's trade policies, and they're now the Democratic platform," said Scott Paul, president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing, a lobby group that has long pushed back against the free trade ethos that dominated Washington for decades.........................
https://www.npr.org/2023/04/16/1142356840/biden-industrial-policy
