Back in the presidential campaign in 2004, the phenomenon of factories closing and being outsourced was a hot topic. George Bush was vulnerable, particularly in industrial states like Ohio, and John Kerry had an excellent opportunity to take advantage by proposing a concrete way to prevent factory closings. But he blew it. He made a speech about preventing outsourcing which consisted of simply changing tax laws, the issue disappeared, and he wound up (maybe) losing Ohio and thus the election.
Hillary seems to want to make the same mistake. According to the N.Y. Times, www.nytimes.com/…, her big jobs-creating proposal is...to change tax laws. You know, stop giving companies tax breaks when they move a factory overseas, and, yawn, give them a tax break when they invest at home. Meanwhile, as the same article explains, Trump is boasting that somehow even people who lose their factory jobs now will somehow manage to be rehired.
As Les Leopold explains, www.alternet.org/…, Hillary could be in big trouble vis-a-vis Trump anyway with working class voters, much less by proposing solutions that won’t solve the problem...I mean, that’s what solutions are supposed to do, no?
At least Sanders is advocating spending about $100 billion to rebuild the infrastructure. However, first, he doesn’t emphasize this idea, and the proposal usually crops up for a few sentences in the middle of his speeches. Second, $100 billion isn’t enough to solve the problem. Trump is advocating ideas which would be very difficult to get through Congress — basically, he is saying he will have the authority to impose large tariffs on companies that shut down factories and then bring the products over the border, which the President cannot currently do — but at least it sounds like something that would solve the problem. Where is a similar solution on the Left?
I have advocated an enormous agenda of spending close to $2 trillion a year to create a carbon-free infrastructure while simultaneously rebuilding the manufacturing sector (GreenNewDealPlan.com). You might think this is way too ambitious. Fine. But during FDR’s terms, the Federal government hired millions of people to rebuild the infrastructure, and even during Eisenhower’s terms, millions were employed building the Interstate Highway System, the largest public works project in world history.
Bernie and others rightly talk about trade policy when they discuss bringing jobs back. This is fine, but most people don’t understand trade policy. Even when they do, such as many union workers, it seems to me that it is unclear how changes in trade policy would bring back jobs, not simply stop the outflow (Trump has no solution to bringing jobs back either, he just talks about stopping the outflow). Progressives used to talk about “industrial policy”, in fact in the 1980s Robert Reich even wrote a book about it. Where are those discussions now? This is not an academic question — as I outline in an article, www.globalteachin.com/…, unless manufacturing is rebuilt, there is no way to solve the problem of income inequality, and in addition to the economic suffering that will bring, clearly we may have a problem with a fascistic political movement if progressives cannot offer a concrete solution ...that actually solves the problem.
I offer this critique of Hillary not to bash her — although I prefer Sanders — but because I want her to win the general election if she is the nominee. In other words, this is offered with love and kindness.