Maintaining a strong America means shoring up manufacturing

OPINION:

As someone who has lived the American dream and had the opportunity to rise from poverty to own and operate a successful business, I deeply love this country and often talk about threats to our future prosperity. My focus is usually our government’s addiction to debt and the reasons I believe our cumulative debt poses the single greatest danger to our way of life.

Despite the dangers posed by this problem, most people are unaware of its significance. In many polls, it barely registers. Still, two issues that are closely related to our debt — jobs and the economy — are often listed as major concerns for a majority of Americans. Specifically, there has long been a concern about American jobs, particularly manufacturing jobs, being shipped overseas.

Those who study history are well aware that the United States was the world’s preeminent economic power coming out of World War II. This was mostly due to U.S. manufacturing. Although we were a production powerhouse before the war, the fact that we escaped the decimation that Europe and Japan experienced moved us into the position of unrivaled leadership in manufacturing in the postwar years.

While the United States is still a manufacturing powerhouse, we are nowhere near where we were in those years after WWII, including in the 1970s, in terms of the things we produce and the number of manufacturing jobs as a percentage of our workforce. Even with the loss of manufacturing jobs, however, the big story of the last 70 years has been the growth of the U.S. economy.

According to a 2004 American Heritage article, the gross domestic product, which is the value of all goods and services produced in the U.S., was $380 billion in 1954. By 2003, that number had risen to $10.8 trillion, more than 28 times the 1954 total. Even when accounting for inflation over the period in between, the economy was over six times as large as it had been in 1954.

Although such numbers would seem to indicate that the loss of U.S. manufacturing has not harmed our economy, I believe that nothing could be further from the truth. The jobs that have replaced manufacturing are largely in the service sector.

Jobs in this sector are honorable ones, and in many cases they are performed by highly skilled people. But I believe they are best as a complement and not a substitute for manufacturing jobs.

Why do I say this? Because while services make our lives better, many of the products produced through manufacturing are necessary for our survival. For example, we all need food to eat. We also need a place to live, the energy to heat or cool our homes, a vehicle to get us where we need to go, and the fuel to power that vehicle.

Without manufacturing, we would have none of these things.

I prefer that most areas of production related to these and other necessities occur in the United States rather than elsewhere. It is more than a preference; I believe it is a matter of national security. We all saw the problems with supply chains from other countries during the pandemic and in its aftermath.

We learned to live without certain things while we waited, but it would have been a problem if we were dependent on any of those supply chains for the majority of our food and fuel.

Another issue with depending on foreign countries for our necessities is a number of “bad actor” countries. Depending on these countries for some of our necessities makes no sense.

This is one of the many reasons that I believe President Biden’s war on oil and natural gas is so dangerous. Despite his rhetoric, we are using just as much oil and gas today as we were when he became president. The difference is that his shortsighted policies toward domestic production have made us  more dependent on oil from nations such as Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Venezuela than we were when he took office. This is harmful to our country.

I began this column by linking our debt crisis to the loss of manufacturing jobs because I believe tackling our debt and strengthening our manufacturing base are both vital steps that must be taken if the U.S. is to remain a world leader moving forward.

As we continually pile up debt, we are making choices today that limit, or perhaps even take away, our choices for tomorrow. If we don’t work on maximizing our production and expanding our manufacturing base, particularly when it comes to items such as food, energy and medicine, we put ourselves in the position of being at the mercy of other nations rather than maintaining control of our own destiny.

In my experience, opting for dependency instead of self-sufficiency is never a good place to be. I want to take America back for the people.