The United States can bring manufacturing back — which will bring back good jobs and protect national interests.
The panic in the United States over the lack of masks and ventilators for Covid-19 has mostly eased, but please, don’t let those scary few weeks fade too quickly. The scramble for medical equipment was a telling moment for the American economy because it revealed something alarming: The United States can no longer produce what it needs in a time of crisis, even if those things were invented here.
In the past two decades, the U.S. economy has been lulled into following a path of offshoring, driven by an ideology celebrating short-term financial gains above everything else. The country, once a manufacturing powerhouse, is populated by corporations that have moved manufacturing overseas and lost their ability to produce domestically, leaving little behind except shell companies that employ relatively few people. The United States no longer produces even the essentials, from personal protective equipment to our smartphones and laptops.
