Monday, March 23, 2020 | 2 a.m.
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If there’s anything COVID-19 makes clear, it’s that the system we had in place to reward American companies for moving manufacturing offshore must be reversed and we have to move manufacturing back to the United States.
The combination of offshoring, stock buybacks and a misplaced incentive system for executives has driven a dynamic that favors offshoring and fostered the destruction of the American middle class.
The structural weakness of being a service economy is shockingly visible as this economy grounds to a halt because so much of what we do involves face-to-face service operations.
Now, our weaknesses in manufacturing are creating shortages of direly needed products, as evidenced by stories of hospital workers using common office supplies to create makeshift face masks.
Our helplessness to make something as simple as paper masks demonstrates something we should remedy with significant national focus: If we were still a manufacturing power, we would not only have a potent middle class, we would have the production lines capable of pivoting to make what this nation needs in a time of crisis.
The key to the United States’ pivot to a war footing after Pearl Harbor was that we had actual manufacturing capacity that could shift from making tractors to tanks and railroad cars to battleships. We are naked today — we can’t produce simple products and are at the mercy of other countries for manufacturing.
The collapse of the middle class was already reason enough to bring back manufacturing — really doing it, not just claiming to do it like President Donald Trump has done. Trump’s package of tax cuts, tariffs and reductions of regulations have prompted some companies to relocate jobs to the U.S., but not a significant amount. In fact, the number of those jobs in Trump’s first two years in office equaled less than one month of the average job gains the American economy has experienced in the past 10 years.
Now comes the coronavirus outbreak, which is the Pearl Harbor of this generation because it shows how vulnerable our nation has become to disruption of supply chains and daily life.
We urgently need to return high-paying manufacturing jobs to America and build plants capable of pivoting to other production in times of crisis.
