A surge in manufacturing construction across the country is grabbing the attention of economists and workers on the ground as legislative efforts to reinvigorate the U.S. industrial base are bearing fruit.
Experts say these changes have been long-awaited, and they represent a watershed moment for U.S. heavy industry and a shift toward more environmentally friendly methods of production amid an ongoing climate emergency.
“We waited for so long to have these kinds of initiatives,” Miki Banu, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan, told The Hill. “This is probably the first time in my life when I’ve seen so many resources become available, which are able to let us put our ideas into practice.”
Initiatives to reshore U.S. manufacturing jobs in the wake of geopolitical tensions fanned by the coronavirus pandemic have been a key focus for senior Biden administration officials.
This has been especially true for the semiconductor industry, which experienced a major shortage following the pandemic. The semiconductor industry’s concentration in traditional East Asian manufacturing hubs like Taiwan helped to spur the passage of the CHIPS Act over concerns about the territorial ambitions of China, the U.S.’s main economic rival.
But even larger-scale trends in the international economy and growing
The supply chain snafus seen across the U.S. economy during the pandemic have bolstered a central plank of President Biden's economic policy: he says that now is the time to invest in America, make things in America, and buy things made in America.
Biden's vision is for the government to lure back manufacturing that moved offshore, particularly semiconductors and electric vehicles.
"Folks, where is it written that America can't once again be the manufacturing capital of the world?" Biden said on a tour earlier this month of a Cummins plant in Minneapolis that makes a device used to produce clean power.
Biden has embraced what's known as 'industrial policy'
In speech after speech as he gears up for his reelection bid, Biden is making the case for his brand of industrial policy — using taxes, subsidies and regulations to systematically shape the economy.
Making Manufacturing Great Again
Why are Biden policies producing a manufacturing revival but Trump policies didn’t? Well, Trump’s trade policy was simply incompetent: Because it raised tariffs on industrial inputs as well as consumer goods, it raised costs and may well have reduced manufacturing employment. And the Trump tax cut was based on the belief that if you let corporations keep more of their profits, they’ll invest the money rather than use it to, say, buy back shares; this belief was proved wrong.
Biden’s industrial policies, by contrast, are largely focused on creating demand for U.S.-manufactured products, for example by subsidizing the purchase of electric vehicles. And business investment, while far less sensitive to tax rates than legend has it, is very responsive to demand.
And so we’re having a huge manufacturing revival.
Bidenomics Is ‘America First’ With a Brain
With a 250-page White House report on “supply chain resilience,” and the U.S. Senate’s approval of a $250-billion bill to compete with a rising China, the administration is trying to launch the United States on a new path toward rebuilding economic self-sufficiency, jump-starting innovation, and spreading economic benefits more broadly among Americans. Trump promised in his first speech as president to “remove the rust from the rust belt and usher in a new industrial revolution,” and then accomplished nothing of the sort. Biden may usher in that revolution.
The new White House report is ostensibly focused on supply chain security in four technologies: semiconductors, advanced batteries, critical minerals, and pharmaceuticals. But the document offers a far-reaching critique of the last several decades of U.S. international economic policy, arguing that both government and the private sector have “prioritized efficiency and low costs over security, sustainability and resilience.” It calls for a fundamental redirection with an ambitious set of goals: revitalizing U.S. manufacturing, speeding up deployment of green technologies, improving supply security and resilience in critical sectors, creating new union jobs, reducing economic and racial inequality, and spreading wealth regionally across the country.
So a mea culpa of sorts: as much as I loved Joe Biden, I did not love him enough.
Now onto some more good news!
Democrats are great.
Cooler hiring in June could help the Fed achieve an elusive ‘soft landing’ for US economy
Another month, another solid gain for America’s job market.
The pace of hiring by businesses and government agencies in June — 209,000 added jobs — was the smallest monthly gain in 2 1/2 years. But it was still a healthy increase and enough to reduce the unemployment rate from 3.7% to 3.6%, near a half-century low.
Yet there were also signs in Friday’s government report that the job market is cooling to a more sustainable pace of growth — a trend that, if it continues, could reassure the Fed that its rate hikes are reducing inflation pressures without derailing the economy.
You know who I love? Pete Buttigieg
Bad News for bad Guys
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene Booted From Right-Wing House Freedom Caucus
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) was recently kicked out of the House Freedom Caucus after a string of disagreements with the conservative group, according to two GOP lawmakers familiar with the situation.
“She is no longer with HFC,” a Republican lawmaker told The Daily Beast, noting that “disparaging” fellow members is frowned upon.
Special counsel prosecutors question witnesses about chaotic Oval Office meeting after Trump lost the 2020 election
Special counsel Jack Smith’s team has signaled a continued interest in a chaotic Oval Office meeting that took place in the final days of the Trump administration, during which the former president considered some of the most desperate proposals to keep him in power over objections from his White House counsel.
Multiple sources told CNN that investigators have asked several witnesses before the grand jury and during interviews about the meeting, which happened about six weeks after Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. Some witnesses were asked about the meeting months ago, while several others have faced questions about it more recently, including Rudy Giuliani.
Last month, for two consecutive days, Giuliani sat down with investigators for a voluntary interview about a range of topics, including the tumultuous December 2020 meeting that he attended, sources said.
New glimpses into 2020 election interference probe suggest peril could be growing for Trump and his associates
Revelations that special counsel Jack Smith has been digging into efforts to overturn former President Donald Trump’s Arizona election loss in 2020 bolster growing indications that his investigation is nearing a critical point.
New CNN reporting on Thursday also suggests that Smith remains interested in a chaotic Oval Office meeting days before Trump left office during which the former president considered some of the wildest schemes dreamed up to try to keep him in power, despite pushback from his White House counsel.
Smith has already made Trump the first former president to be formally accused of federal crimes. Trump was charged last month with the willful retention of national defense information and over alleged obstruction of the investigation in connection with a trove of classified documents he kept at his Florida home after leaving office.
But a flurry of details about Smith’s inquiries into alleged election-stealing efforts suggest his investigators have had an industrious summer. On Wednesday evening, for instance, Rusty Bowers – the Republican former Arizona House speaker who once said it was “foreign to my very being” to submit to Trump’s bid to subvert the Constitution – said publicly for the first time on CNN that he had spoken to the FBI.
Republicans sound alarm over DeSantis’s sagging campaign
Questions surrounding Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s (R) presidential campaign strategy are multiplying as he continues to trail former President Trump in the polls nearly a month after his highly anticipated campaign launch.
Meanwhile, DeSantis’s campaign faced backlash this week after sharing a video attacking Trump over his past comments in support of the LGBTQ+ community, leading some Republicans to raise concerns.
One Republican strategist described the DeSantis PAC spokesperson’s comments as “a very clear-eyed moment.”
“They realize they’re in a hole,” the strategist told The Hill. “They realize they can potentially win this and they are the only other game in town, but again, they are in a big hole.”
Other Good News
Could Putin Lose Power?
Regime stability is a funny thing. One day it’s there; the next day, poof—it’s gone. The Moscow-based historian, who asked that his name not be used since he was still in Russia, recalled what it was like to observe the Politburo in the early nineteen-eighties. “They looked like a totally homogeneous mass,” he said. “There was no indication, in their public statements or in anything else, that any of these people thought differently from one another.” But Gorbachev, it turned out, did think differently. In the years to come, he undertook a series of reforms that ended with the Soviet Union ceasing to exist. Authoritarian regimes could seem very stable, until suddenly they weren’t.
Putin’s fall could be the domino that topples the world’s autocrats
Vladimir Putin is likely on his way out as Russia’s president. He will be followed by autocrats governing countries such as Hungary, Turkey and Israel — to name a few. Though this process will take some time, it is a clear triumph of the innovative democratic principles upon which the United States was founded in 1776.
Though the mutiny was quickly resolved and Putin kept his office, it took him several days to address the Russian and international public. And when he did, he seemed nervous and diffident, did not make eye contact with his audience and spoke as fast as a machine gun to assert his authority. But all many saw was an “emperor with no clothes.”
A similar descent awaits autocrats such as Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey’s president, and Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister — despite many differences among them.
Erdoğan has been Turkey’s president since 2017 and its prime minister for many years before that. In the election held in May, he suffered the humiliation of having to go through a runoff election because his conservative party, Justice and Development, was unable to garner the support of more than 50 percent of the voters. Next time, or perhaps sooner, he may be forced out.
Having lived in Israel for many years, I have watched it slide into autocratic, theocratic democracy to a breaking point that has been taking hundreds of thousands of Israelis every weekend for the past 22 weeks in protest. Among the protesters were many army leaders, air force reservists and public figures, such as former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak who recently called for “civil disobedience” against Netanyahu’s plan. As a result, Netanyahu has softened his stance, but he could still be ousted in the next elections.
Putin, Orbán, Erdoğan and Netanyahu are but a few examples of declining autocratic rulers. Others in several ex-Soviet countries and China’s President Xi Jinping are taking note of these developments and calculating their next steps.
And while it is impossible to predict how these rulers will fall, the tide has clearly turned. Some may be removed by force, others by voters, and some may be forbidden to run for reelection for many years, as was the case of former President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil.
More and more people seem to prefer life where they are “we the people” than where they are “we the subjects.” Our forefathers established such a novel preference in 1776. Now more countries and people are fighting for it.
New Federal Decisions Make Alzheimer’s Drug Leqembi Widely Accessible
The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday gave full approval to the Alzheimer’s drug Leqembi, and Medicare said it would cover much of its high cost, laying the foundation for widespread use of a medication that can modestly slow cognitive decline in the early stages of the disease
The new treatment approved by the FDA is a big deal.
A proven treatment to slow down the progression of Alzheimer’s — a devastating disease that robs individuals of their personality, autonomy, and ultimately life — has long been out of reach.
But within the next year, Alzheimer’s patients could conceivably have access to not just one such treatment, but two.
This new era for Alzheimer’s treatment began this week, when the Food and Drug Administration granted full approval to a new Alzheimer’s drug, lecanemab, which is being sold by its manufacturer Eisai under the brand name Leqembi. Memory clinics are already reporting increasing curiosity among patients about the new treatment, and they expect interest will only grow following the FDA’s final sign-off.
In the next few weeks, new clinical trial results are also expected for another treatment candidate, donanemab, which has had impressive preliminary results.