Two months ago, from a podium at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University, President Obama outlined his prescription for a renaissance in American manufacturing.
“We have not run out of stuff to make; we’ve just got to reinvigorate our manufacturing sector so that it leads the world the way it always has, from paper and steel and cars to new products that we haven’t even dreamed up yet. That’s how we’re going to strengthen existing industries; that’s how we’re going to spark new ones.”
His Advanced Manufacturing Partnership will devote $500 million annually in federal and private sector funding to spur the development of cutting-edge technologies to lead the manufacturing revival. The future, the White House insists, is as bright as energy-efficient LED lighting.
Well, maybe.
The trouble is, $500 million is not nearly enough. As Alan Tonelson of the U.S. Business and Industry Council points out, what’s killing American manufacturing is a staggering volume of imports. Writing in The Christian Science Monitor last month, Tonelson noted that U.S. manufacturing ran a $565 billion trade deficit last year.
“So far this year, that deficit is running 14.5 percent higher — despite a slowing economy, which is supposed to curb Americans’ appetite for imports. Every dollar of this trade deficit represents lost opportunities for production, employment, and innovation. Worse, the borrowing needed to pay for these goods further boosts already dangerous levels of U.S. debt.”
And by “goods,” Tonelson isn’t talking about the tiny toys in McDonald’s Happy Meals or even the cheap T-shirts at Walmart. He’s talking about stuff that’s supersized — like gargantuan segments of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge.
Get this: According to The New York Times, the Chinese, in July, shipped us “the last four of more than two dozen giant steel modules — each with a roadbed segment about half the size of a football field,” to be assembled in Oakland as the eastern span of the new Bay Bridge.
“The assembly work in California, and the pouring of the concrete road surface, will be done by Americans,” Times reporter David Barboza clarified. “But construction of the bridge decks and the materials that went into them are a Made in China affair,” made possible by “hundreds of Chinese laborers” working at “a sprawling manufacturing complex” in Shanghai.
So while California took in billions in stimulus cash for transportation infrastructure projects that were supposed to generate American jobs, state officials saw it fit to ship massive chunks of the $7.2-billion Bay Bridge contract to China. And we wonder why efforts to stimulate the U.S. economy have failed?
In fact, Barboza reports, “California decided not to apply for federal funding for the project because the ‘Buy America’ provisos would probably have required purchasing more expensive steel and fabrication from United States manufacturers.”
And as Brian A. Petersen, the project director, explained it to the Times, the U.S. fabrication industry may not have been able to “put a project like this together.”
“Most U.S. companies don’t have these types of warehouses, equipment or the cash flow. The Chinese load the ships, and it’s their ships that deliver to our piers.”
Translation: We in America, despite the president’s eloquent assurances, simply aren’t good enough.
Folks, that’s very, very sad.
It’s one thing to have the Chinese assembling our iPhones but quite another to have them building our bridges — better than we ever could . If anything, the Bay Bridge project is a testament to the systematic erosion of America’s manufacturing capacity, aided and abetted by corporate greed and decades of short-sighted public policy.
Turning things around will require more than a paltry $500 million and a few encouraging words. Make no mistake: We need a long-term, consumer-led commitment to American manufacturing jobs and employment.
Let’s be clear in telling Washington that an American bridge made in China is a bridge too far.