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 on 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 the significance that it plays in our lives. This is plain to see when you look at polls because in many of them that we see on a regular basis, it barely registers. Two issues which are closely related to our debt, jobs and the economy, are however 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 economic power of the world coming out of WWII. This was mostly due to U.S. manufacturing. Although we were a production powerhouse prior to the war, the fact that we escaped the decimation that Europe and Japan experienced during the war moved us into the position of unrivaled leadership in the area of manufacturing after the war.
The United States is still a manufacturing powerhouse, but we are nowhere near where we were in the 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, the big story of the last 70 years has been the growth of the U.S. economy. According to a 2004 article on americanheritage.com, in 1954 the gross domestic product, which is the value of all goods and services produced in the U.S. economy, was $380 billion. 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 6 times as large as it had been in 1954.
Although numbers such as these 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 part of the service sector. Jobs in this sector are honorable ones, and in many cases performed by highly skilled people, but I believe they are best as a compliment and not a substitute to manufacturing jobs.
Why do I say this? Because while services make our lives better, at a basic level many of the products produced through manufacturing processes are necessary for our survival. For example, we all need to have 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 processes, we would have none of these things.
I don’t know about you, but I prefer that most areas of production related to these and other necessities occur in the United States, rather than elsewhere. In truth, it is really more than a preference, I believe it is a matter of national security. We all saw the problems with supply chains from other countries, both during and in the aftermath of the COVID pandemic. Of course there were things that we learned to live without 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 that we all know there are a number of “bad actor” countries out there. Depending on these countries for some of our necessities makes no sense. This is one of the many reasons that I believe Joe Biden’s war on oil and 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 short-sighted policies toward domestic production have put us in a situation where we are now more dependent on oil from nations such as Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Venezuela than we were when he took office. This makes no sense and is very 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 a 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.