So my brilliant bother Frank B. Cochran has the following "think globally, act locally" thoughts on opportunities for reshoring and/or import substitution arising from the grass-roots experience of ordinary community members:
Under its Constitution, the U.S. is a federal republic. The economy looks more like a declining empire. Harris and Biden need to use the "transition" time, and teams, to craft a new and very different set of economic policies. The pandemic, even more than the 2008 recession, has shown that the "trickle down" theory - that stimulating upper class income growth would result in improved living for everyone else - is, as it has always been, false. The sectors of the economy in which unemployment has remained high probably will not rebound any time soon. These sectors never provided, and will never provide stable livable earnings to the large majority of the people who worked in them.
But there are assets to which the national government has not recently looked: the same people who turned out to vote in record numbers in most states and, most clearly, in those cities which have declined most precipitously with the departure of manufacturing jobs. We the people have the vast experience and energy, and the wealthy have the financial resources to determine where and how each locality might help to build a 21st Century economy suitable to a diversity of local communities in a federal republic.
During the lengthy Democratic Party debates in 2019, lots of creative thoughts were voiced by those candidates for the Presidential nomination who did not get the job; and the governors of all 50 states have, during the pandemic, learned how to craft solutions to difficult problems. As have the governments of innumerable cities. Although the national parties have sparred over the details of "stimulus packages" none of their proposals takes advantage of this opportunity to re-orient local economies sustainably.
This is the time for the transition teams and, eventually, the Commerce Department to adopt a strategy tapping people, locales, and industries to fill the innumerable niches in that national and world economies that U.S. manufacturing once filled. The pandemic is well-suited as the impetus Here are a couple of examples of such niches; probably every mayor and governor could add their own:
I have been unable to find anyone to repair my refrigerator, and cannot buy a new one because the supplies of relevant parts, once made in the U.S. but now mostly lower quality imports, cannot be found; and
Yesterday a friend told me of a relative who works in a facility assembling vacuum cleaners who has been repeatedly furloughed for short times because parts, ordered from China, have not arrived.
There are abandoned machine tools, factories and workers in innumerable locales scattered throughout the United States. And the people who live and once worked in those facilities including but not limited to engineers, businesspeople and political leaders, are capable of determining in what fields their localities might have a competitive advantage. The Commerce Department can and should conduct a national seminar in visioning how to get U.S. made products in our local stores and provide substantial support only to those projects suggested by locals found to have stable long-term employment capacity.
- Frank B. Cochran can be contacted directly at fbcochran@comcast.net
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