Making It In America: A Key Progressive Objective

The widespread frustration with this nation's perceived lack of urgency and focus on industrial policy was captured well in Monday's New York Times article on the subject, which contained this sobering fact: "The United States ranks behind every industrial nation except France in the percentage of overall economic activity devoted to manufacturing—13.9 percent, the World Bank reports, down 4 percentage points in a decade."

As ideologues on the right scorn the idea of an industrial policy by saying things like "the government can't get involved in picking winners and losers in the economy," by standing on the sidelines we have in effect make American workers and the American economy losers.

How much we've lost is brought home in the opening essay, by Richard McCormack, the editor of Manufacturing & Technology News, in a book released this week by the Alliance for American Manufacturing, "Manufacturing A Better Future for America."

"The collective denial by America's economic elite of the need for an industrial base has led the country to a precipice," he writes. As these elites pooh-pooh the disappearance of America's manufacturing base, that lost manufacturing capacity has meant that workers have fewer options for making a livable wage, we lack the funds to rebuild our eroding infrastructure, and whole regions of our country are in an economic depression.

"The United States is broke," McCormack writes. "It is broke because it has stopped producing what it consumes."

President Obama knows that the economy cannot be revived by merely replicating the faux sense of economic growth that emerged in the middle of the decade and led to today's economic collapse. As he was quoted in The Times, "The fight for American manufacturing is the fight for America’s future.”

The challenge that the progressive movement must take up is forging an industrial policy that matches the urgency in Obama's statement.

To meet that challenge, the Campaign for America's Future is leading a "Making It In America" initiative intended to put industrial policy at the forefront of the debate over economic recovery. The effort begins with the argument that Dave Johnson laid out Monday in his post, "It's the Economic Paradigm, Stupid!" The presumption that the American economy can be rebuilt on a foundation of low-wage jobs, consumption of cheap overseas goods and a widening gap between the working class and the very rich is a prescription for an economic and political disaster we dare not contemplate.

On The Huffington Post this afternoon and this site on Wednesday, Robert Borosage will write a commentary that will elaborate on the importance of this issue and the policy discusssions we hope to drive in the months ahead.

We do need a new paradigm, and part of that paradigm is that we need a national industrial policy—not what The Times described as "ad hoc initiatives," such as the laudable effort to promote green jobs, but an overarching strategy that guides our trade policies, our infrastructure spending, our tax incentives, our job training and education—in short, all of the elements of our economic policy.

Other major economic powers have an industrial policy, and they are using those policies to move ahead of us in the global marketplace.

Over the next few months we will be promoting a long-overdue dialogue between workers, economists, political leaders and other progressive thinkers about how we build a sustainable new economy with manufacturing as a central component. These are often tough and unglamorous issues. One thing is clear: If we do not get in front of this issue now and lay the political groundwork for a meaningful political debate, we are in mortal danger of falling back into the same Wall Street-centric economic cycle that brought us to this point, only with more serious consequences the next time around.

Views expressed on this page are those of the authors and not necessarily those of Campaign for America's Future or Institute for America's Future