Building The New Economy

"Budgetball is an innovative sport that combines fiscal strategy and physical play."
- Budgetball Rulebook, "Pass the Ball - Not The Buck"

Billionaire Pete Peterson is funding an elaborate campaign to convince a nation with more than 15 million unemployed citizens that the most urgent crisis we face today is not unemployment ... or poverty, or inadequate healthcare, or the decimation of the middle class. He's already created a "news service" to propagate his ideas - the Washington Post outsourced its financial reporting to him - and hosted a "deficit summit" headlined by the same people that got us into the mess we're in today. (Greenspan? Rubin? That's not called a "summit." It's called "rounding up the usual suspects.")

Now Peterson's funding an "America Speaks" series of town halls with participation from President Obama's deficit commission. No matter who's in charge, money always talks. ("Money doesn't talk, it swears," said the folksinger.) In an especially peculiar use of his wealth, Peterson has also paid consultants to come up with the game of "budgetball." And in a Marie Antoinette-ish gesture, Peterson's deficit mavens will be playing this "game" on May 21, on the National Mall of a nation whose middle and lower classes are still racked by financial misery. more »

If you move the manufacturing away, research and development will eventually follow. more »

Wind energy is supposed to be able to create thousands of manufacturing jobs, but unfortunately the early wind energy manufacturing jobs financed by U.S. more »

Did you know that the Army can no longer purchase domestically produced Howitzer triggers? Yesterday at the Building the New Economy conference, Carolyn Bartholomew, chair of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission explained that she'd seen this news turn on lightbulbs in the minds of Republicans as to why it's important to preserve manufacturing capacity in America. more »

The kind of global economic stress we are experiencing is bound to create tensions within the world trading system. Understandably, every company is working to improve its own position. But in countries and regions that are unconstrained by the due process requirements of the U.S. justice system, we have seen signs of trade actions that seriously undermine the global steel market. Nowhere are these destabilizing actions more apparent than in China.

China, of course, is by now the world’s largest steel producer, and market-driven companies like U. S. Steel are competing with what amounts to a coordinated, national enterprise. Because of its size, and its system, the Chinese steel industry has the potential to be very disruptive to our global industry.

As U. S. producers and the United Steelworkers allege in our pending anti-dumping and subsidy filings against tubular imports from China — we believe that the subsidized steel Chinese producers flooded into the U. S. last year severely damaged the market for this particular pipe and forced curtailment in production and employee layoffs. more »

To our nation’s peril, the free trade orthodoxy continues to ignore a fundamental economic fact: It matters where things are made.

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The American manufacturing industry and its employees are constantly told that they need to be better competitors in the global market, that they must increase the value they add. How are they doing on that? more »

We've got a new red scare. Forget Glenn Beck; the fear isn't that America is going red, it's that it is in the red. Conservatives in both parties are raising alarms about deficits and government spending. Well, get over it. If we are going to generate growth and shared prosperity out of the mess we are in, expanded public investment must be a centerpiece of the new economy.

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President Barack Obama announced today $3.4 billion in government grants to help build a "smart" electric grid. Like many Obama initiatives, it’s a smart first step. But much more is needed and one piece is rarely mentioned at all. more »