TBR News May 10, 2020

The Voice of the White House
Washington, D.C. May 10, 2020: Working in the White House as a junior staffer is an interesting experience.
When I was younger, I worked as a summer-time job in a clinic for people who had moderate to severe mental problems and the current work closely, at times, echos the earlier one.
I am not an intimate of the President but I have encountered him from time to time and I daily see manifestations of his growing psychological problems.
He insults people, uses foul language, is frantic to see his name mentioned on main-line television and pays absolutely no attention to any advice from his staff that runs counter to his strange ideas.
He lies like a rug to everyone, eats like a hog, makes lewd remarks to female staffers and flies into rages if anyone dares to contradict him.
It is becoming more and more evident to even the least intelligent American voter that Trump is vicious, corrupt and amoral. He has stated often that even if he loses the
election in 2020, he will not leave the White House. I have news for Donald but this is not the place to discuss it. “
Comment for May 10, 2020:”Trump, as President, has clearly proven to be a total failure. His physical and emotional problems preclude him from making rational responses to serious crisis and we are now seeing the results of his disabilities. Businesses bankrupt, millions now unemployed, national policies veering sharply from side to side, massive inconsistanties, broken promises and overall, a feeling one is sitting in on a group therapy session at a clinic for mental problems. Both the far right and the Christian far right support Trump because like always gravitates to like but it is doubted that they are strong enough to reelect Trump to the Oval Office. And given his psychological problems, if Trump sees he is going to fail in November, he is apt to perpetrate some terrible act in the hopes that he will continue what he calls his ‘Kingship of America.’ It is known inside Washington power circles that Trump has had two heart attacks. Perhaps the stress of a campaign will bring on the final one.”

The Table of Contents
• Under Trump, American exceptionalism means poverty, misery and death
• In leaked call, Obama describes Trump handling of virus as chaotic
• Trump still seems to not understand how bad the coronavirus crisis is
• Trump Against the Government: Officials Conflicted Over Lying for the President
• The Real Scandal of the Pandemic: Our Terrible Care for the Elderly
• Handling of Coronavirus Threatens a Long Unemployment Crisis
• Stop Letting Jared Run Things
• Innovation Should Be Made in the U.S.A.

Under Trump, American exceptionalism means poverty, misery and death
No other advanced nation denies healthcare and work protections, or loosens lockdown while fatalities mount
May 10, 202
by Robert Reich
The Guardian
No other nation has endured as much death from Covid-19 nor nearly as a high a death rate as has the United States.
With 4.25% of the world population, America has the tragic distinction of accounting for about 30% of pandemic deaths so far.
And it is the only advanced nation where the death rate is still climbing. Three thousand deaths per day are anticipated by 1 June.
No other nation has loosened lockdowns and other social-distancing measures while deaths are increasing, as the US is now doing.
No other advanced nation was as unprepared for the pandemic as was the US.
We now know Donald Trump and his administration were told by public health experts in mid-January that immediate action was required to stop the spread of Covid-19. But according to Dr Anthony Fauci, “there was a lot of pushback”. Trump didn’t act until 16 March.
Epidemiologists estimate 90% of the deaths in the US from the first wave of Covid-19 might have been prevented had social distancing policies been put into effect two weeks earlier, on 2 March.
No nation other than the US has left it to subordinate units of government – states and cities – to buy ventilators and personal protective equipment. In no other nation have such sub-governments been forced to bid against each another.
In no other nation have experts in public health and emergency preparedness been pushed aside and replaced by political cronies like Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who in turn has been advised by Trump donors and Fox News celebrities.
In no other advanced nation has Covid-19 forced so many average citizens into poverty so quickly. The Urban Institute reports that more than 30% of American adults have had to reduce their spending on food.
Elsewhere around the world, governments are providing generous income support. Not in the US.
At best, Americans have received one-time checks for $1,200, about a week’s worth of rent, groceries and utilities. Few are collecting unemployment benefits because unemployment offices are overwhelmed with claims.
Congress’s “payroll protection program” has been a mess. Because funds have been distributed through financial institutions, banks have raked off money for themselves and rewarded their favored customers. Of the $350bn originally intended for small businesses, $243.4m has gone to large, publicly held companies.
Meanwhile, the treasury and the Fed are bailing out big corporations from the debts they accumulated in recent years to buy back their shares of stock.
Why is America so different from other advanced nations facing the same coronavirus threat? Why has everything gone so tragically wrong?
Some of it is due to Trump and his hapless and corrupt collection of grifters, buffoons, sycophants, lobbyists and relatives.
But there are also deeper roots.
The coronavirus has been especially potent in the US because America is the only industrialized nation lacking universal healthcare. Many families have been reluctant to see doctors or check into emergency rooms for fear of racking up large bills.
America is also the only one of 22 advanced nations failing to give all workers some form of paid sick leave. As a result, many American workers have remained on the job when they should have been home.
Adding to this is the skimpiness of unemployment benefits in America – providing less support in the first year of unemployment than those in any other advanced country.
American workplaces are also more dangerous. Even before Covid-19 ripped through meatpackers and warehouses, fatality rates were higher among American workers than European.
Even before the pandemic robbed Americans of their jobs and incomes, average wage growth in the US had lagged behind average wage growth in most other advanced countries. Since 1980, American workers’ share of total national income has declined more than in any other rich nation.
In other nations, unions have long pushed for safer working conditions and higher wages. But American workers are far less unionized than workers in other advanced economies. Only 6.4% of private-sector workers in America belong to a union, compared with more than 26% in Canada, 37% in Italy, 67% in Sweden, and 25% in Britain.
So who and what’s to blame for the worst avoidable loss of life in American history?
Partly, Donald Trump’s malfeasance.
But the calamity is also due to America’s longer-term failure to provide its people the basic support they need.
Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a columnist for Guardian US

In leaked call, Obama describes Trump handling of virus as chaotic
May 9, 2020
by Steve Holland
Reuters
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Former President Barack Obama described President Donald Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic as “chaotic” in a conference call with former members of his administration, a source said on Saturday.
Obama has largely kept out of the fray even as Trump has blamed him and his Democratic administration for a variety of problems related to having sufficient supplies to battle the pandemic that has killed more than 75,000 Americans.
But in his call on Friday with 3,000 members of the Obama Alumni Association, people who served in his administration, Obama urged his supporters to get behind Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, who is trying to unseat Trump in the Nov. 3 election.
The contents of the call were first reported by Yahoo News. A source familiar with the call confirmed them to Reuters.
Obama said the election “is so important because what we’re going to be battling is not just a particular individual or a political party.”
“What we’re fighting against is these long-term trends in which being selfish, being tribal, being divided, and seeing others as an enemy — that has become a stronger impulse in American life,” he said.
He said this is one reason why “the response to this global crisis has been so anemic and spotty.”
“It would have been bad even with the best of governments. It has been an absolute chaotic disaster when that mindset — of ‘what’s in it for me’ and ‘to heck with everybody else’ — when that mindset is operationalized in our government,” Obama said.
“That’s why, I, by the way, am going to be spending as much time as necessary and campaigning as hard as I can for Joe Biden,” he said.
Obama’s office declined to comment.
White House spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany said Trump’s response to the coronavirus “has been unprecedented” and has saved American lives.
She harked back to the Ukraine inquiry launched by Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives last year that led to House passage of articles of impeachment against Trump. The Republican-led Senate acquitted Trump early this year.
“While Democrats were pursuing a sham witch hunt against President Trump, President Trump was shutting down travel from China. While Democrats encouraged mass gatherings, President Trump was deploying PPE, ventilators, and testing across the country,” she said.
National polls show a tight race between Trump and Biden with six months to go until the election. Biden leads in several battleground states.
Reporting by Steve Holland; Editing by Chris Reese

Trump still seems to not understand how bad the coronavirus crisis is
April 29, 2020
by Stephen Collinson
CNN
Three months in — after a million infections, nearly 60,000 US deaths and a potential economic depression — it’s still unclear whether President Donald Trump grasps the gravity of the coronavirus crisis.
The man who said he knew more about ISIS than the generals and claimed to have stunned dumfounded aides with his scientific acuity prides himself on a mystical instinct to make right calls.
Yet Trump’s leadership in the worst domestic crisis since World War II has consistently featured wrong, ill-informed and dangerous decisions, omissions and politically fueled pivots.
“Many very good experts, very good people too, said this would never affect the United States,” Trump told CNN’s Jim Acosta on Tuesday. “The experts got it wrong. A lot of people got it wrong and a lot of people didn’t know it would be this serious.”
Such comments are typical of Trump’s consistent habit of blaming others for his own poor judgments. For the record, senior Centers for Disease Control and Prevention official Nancy Messonnier warned on February 27 that it was inevitable the disease would reach the US and could be “bad.”
The President’s deflections on Tuesday are typical of his wider political method of evading responsibility by bending the truth and of creating distractions. They play into what is apparently his most pressing concern — massaging his own reputation. Such tactics helped him ride out the Russia scandal and impeachment.
But in the depths of the current disorientating times, the deeper liabilities of the President’s political approach are being exposed. A hostility to details, a resistance to accepting the advice of experts and for learning the messy intricacies of a crisis that interrupted his own narrative in election year. Bolstering such an impression, the Washington Post reported for instance that multiple references to the threat from the novel coronavirus were embedded into Trump’s classified briefings. Either he didn’t read them or he chose to ignore them.
Trump’s initial failure was to downplay the seriousness of the crisis. But his management of the situation ever since then has raised questions about the extent to which the President has appreciated the multi-front challenge facing the United States and the world.
Humanity is facing three crises at the very least — medical, economic and social — that will cause financial and geopolitical reverberations for years. The grim state of the economy was underscored Wednesday morning when it was reported that first-quarter GDP fell 4.8%, the worst contraction since the Great Recession.
Yet Trump says he sees “light at the end of the tunnel” and acts as if America is nearly home free.
The President’s minimizing of the current crisis is also shared by his son-in-law Jared Kushner, who predicted that by July the country will be “really rocking again” in a Fox News interview Wednesday.
“The goal here is to get people back to work,” he said. “The eternal lockdown crowd can make jokes on television but the reality is, is that the data’s on our side and President Trump has created a pathway to safely reopen our country.”
Doubts about the seriousness of the administration’s response were also revealed in a more trivial, yet still telling, episode on Tuesday when Vice President Mike Pence flouted CDC guidance and chose not to wear a facemask during a visit to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. Pence explained that he is frequently tested for Covid-19 so was unlikely to be an asymptomatic carrier of the disease.
But he missed a chance to set an example to the rest of the country.
Trump’s comments contradict his own experts
Trump’s comments on injecting disinfectant last week were ridiculed. But they were a sign of something more than the usual Trumpian storm. They were remarks of a President who often appears unprepared, riffs on intricate issues and hasn’t done the homework to master details of a complicated emergency.
Similarly, Trump urged governors on Monday to seriously consider reopening schools, CNN reported. But he didn’t appear to have considered implications of millions of kids gathering, spreading the virus and infecting older, more vulnerable family members in a manner that could fuel the pandemic. His comment was consistent with an apparent conclusion that the worst of the pandemic has passed and that the virus, which scientists say is lying in wait for reopening, is simply gone.
Even if the looming clutch of state openings do not cause a second spike in the virus, public health experts fear that in the absence of a vaccine it will return with a vengeance later in the year. Not Trump.
“I think what happens is it’s going to go away. This is going to go away. And whether it comes back in a modified form in the fall, we’ll be able to handle it,” he said in remarks that may again amount to underestimating a potential threat.
One of Trump’s top medical experts, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who has been far less enthusiastic than Trump about the lackluster US testing effort appears far less optimistic.
“If by that time we have put into place all of the countermeasures that you need to address this, we should do reasonably well. If we don’t do that successfully, we could be in for a bad fall and a bad winter,” Fauci said on Tuesday during an Economic Club of Washington webinar.
The President is again pushing aggressively for states to get back to business quickly — despite balking at Georgia’s aggressive plan last week.
“Many States moving to SAFELY & QUICKLY reopen!” Trump tweeted on Tuesday, showing little appreciation of the huge gamble with health and lives governors are taking without the safety net of a blanket testing program Trump has declined to provide.
The terrible choice facing political leaders
A wrenching national conversation is needed, ideally led by the President, about the relative impact of the pandemic and the job destroying lockdowns ordered to stop its spread. Political leaders must consider what level of infection and ultimately death is acceptable in a modern society in order to protect basic levels of economic viability. These are crushingly difficult issues that no official expected to face when they ran for office.
But there is no sign that Trump is about to engage on that issue with the public whose confidence will be needed to make any economic rebound sustainable. Every world and local leader is facing these agonizing choices. But given US power, influence and historic leadership of the Western world, a special burden of responsibility is often seen to rest on the shoulders of the man in the Oval Office.
Any normal President who made a prediction that a miracle would sweep a pandemic away, only to see it infect a million Americans over a couple of months, would be politically shattered. President George W. Bush’s failures over Hurricane Katrina look trivial by comparison. Yet Trump is protected in his bubble of unknowingness by a conservative media machine that attacks anyone who contradicts his comments.
Misleading over tests
The administration’s questionable commitment to addressing the nuts and bolts of the emergency have been evident in its repeated promises and failures to scale up the kind of massive testing effort that could help pry open the economy without the risk of a major resurgence.
Trump appears to have convinced himself that the lack of tests that his own experts and governors say are needed to trace and isolate new infections to stop a resurgence are mere distractions.
“There are big believers in testing, and then there are some governors that don’t feel as strongly about it at all,” Trump, said Monday.
Such comments make it seem unlikely the President has read the multiple think tank studies or expert opinions that millions of tests per day are needed to beat the pandemic or is interested in guidance that contradicts his pre-cooked view of the pandemic being close to its end.
Trump prefers to boast about the true fact that the US has tested more people than any other nation, which he did again early Wednesday morning.
“The only reason the U.S. has reported one million cases of CoronaVirus is that our Testing is sooo much better than any other country in the World. Other countries are way behind us in Testing, and therefore show far fewer cases!,” Trump tweeted.
But his sincerity is undermined by the reality that other smaller countries have tested far more people per capita. The US has tested 16.4 tests per 1,000 people, according to the a new Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development report, below the OECD member average of 23.1 tests per 1,000 people and trails Spain and Italy. America does, however, lead the UK and France.
The President’s forecasts for the economy also don’t seem to appreciate the depth of the slide. His predictions of “spectacular” growth in the next few quarters and an economy that will take off like a “rocket” sit uneasily with warnings by a top adviser, Kevin Hassett, that the country could be heading for Great Depression levels of unemployment.
There is also debate about the President’s observance of another aspect of his role as head of state — his willingness to console the country at a time of mourning. Trump usually mentions those who died and says they will not be forgotten during his scripted remarks at the start of press conferences. But he most often talks about the dead in terms of what he says are lower than projected final death toll models after the pandemic. And he has taken to arguing that his efforts — which were belated — might have saved a million lives.
There are no guarantees another president of either party would have done a better job in this time of testing than the unconventional Trump.
But it’s almost certain that he or she would have made a far greater show of mastering the details and would — even for their own political protection if nothing else — have done far more to prepare the country for the trial ahead.
This story has been updated to include comment from Kushner.
CNN’s Betsy Klein contributed to this report.

Trump Against the Government: Officials Conflicted Over Lying for the President
May 7, 2020
by Philip Giraldi
The Unz Review
Once upon a time in the United States there was a consensus among national politicians that there were two areas where there should be a unified approach to policy. They were national security and foreign policy, both of which involved other nations, which made desirable a perception of unity on the part of the president and his cabinet, no matter who was in power. That meant that dissent from individual politicians should never rise to the level of pitting one party against another on the basic Establishment view of what was desirable in terms of U.S. national interests.
That viewpoint has survived at least somewhat intact to this day, even weathering the turmoil of Vietnam, but the apple cart has been somewhat upset by new players in the game, namely the various federal bureaucracies, to include law enforcement, intelligence and the Pentagon. The 2016 election demonstrated that the FBI and CIA in particular were willing to get involved in the game of who should be president, and in so doing they compromised major foreign policy and national security norms, which produced Russiagate as well as the wildly inflated current claims being leveled against China and Russia and even Iran looking ahead to elections in November.
As noted above, the Establishment view on foreign and national security policy was based on the principle that there must always be a united front when dealing with situations that are being closely watched by foreigners. If a cabinet secretary or the president says something relating to foreign or military affairs it should be the unified view of both the administration and the loyal opposition. Unfortunately, with President Donald Trump that unanimity has broken down, largely because the chief executive either refuses to or is incapable of staying on script. The most recent false step involved the origin of the corona virus, with the intelligence community stating that there was no evidence that the virus was “man made or genetically modified” in a lab followed by the president several hours later contradicting that view asserting that he had a “high degree of confidence” that the coronavirus originated in a laboratory in Wuhan, China based on secret information that he could not reveal.
There has also been reports that the Trump White House has in fact been pushing the intelligence community (IC) to “hunt for evidence” linking the virus to the Wuhan laboratory, suggesting that the entire China gambit is mostly political, to have a scapegoat available in case the troubled handling of the virus in the United States becomes a fiasco and therefore a political liability. This pressure apparently prompted an additional statement from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence saying: “The IC will continue to rigorously examine emerging information and intelligence to determine whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or if it was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan.”
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who has claimed without providing any details that there is “overwhelming evidence” that coronavirus came out of the Wuhan laboratory, is reportedly leading the push to demonize China. He and other administration officials have expressed their frustration over the C.I.A.’s apparent inability to come up with a definitive explanation for the outbreak’s origin. C.I.A. analysts have reportedly responded that there is no evidence to support any one theory with “high confidence” and they are afraid that any equivocating response will immediately be politicized. Some analysts noted that their close monitoring of communications regarding the Wuhan lab suggest that the Chinese government itself does not regard the lab as a source of the contagion.
To be sure, any intelligence community document directly blaming the Chinese government for the outbreak would have a devastating impact on bilateral relations for years to come, a consequence that Donald Trump apparently does not appreciate. And previous interactions initiated by Trump administration officials suggest that Washington might use its preferred weapon sanctions in an attempt to pressure other nations to also hold China accountable, which would multiply the damage.
Given what is at stake in light of the White House pressure to prove what might very well be unprovable, many in the intelligence community who actually value what they do and how they do it are noticeably annoyed and some have even looked for allies in Congress, where they have found support from the Pentagon over Administration decision making that is both Quixotic and heavily politicized.
House Armed Services Committee Chairman Adam Smith of Washington has responded to the concerns expressed to him by both the military and intelligence communities, admitting that he is “…worried about a culture developing” where many senior officials are now making decision not on the merits of the case but rather out of fear that they will upset the president if they do not choose correctly.
While the intelligence agencies are concerned over the fabrication of a false consensus over the coronavirus, similar to what occurred regarding Iraq’s alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction in 2002-3, the Defense Department is more concerned that fundamental mechanisms that have been in place since the Second World War are now under attack, including how the military maintains discipline and punishes officers and enlisted men who have deviated from established policies.
Appealing to his base of support, Trump has notoriously pardoned Chief Petty Officer Edward Gallagher, a Navy seal who was clearly guilty of murder in Afghanistan, and even met with him afterwards in the White House. Regarding Gallagher, Senate Armed Services Committee Democrat Jack Reed of Rhode Island said in a November that “The White House’s handling of this matter erodes the basic command structure of the military and the basic function of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.”
Trump is now meddling in the treatment of Navy Captain Brett Crozier, who was relieved of his command after he went public with complains about the spread of coronavirus on his ship. In early April the president said “I may just get involved.” In the military services such interference even has a name, “undue command influence.” Clearly, the White House is seeking to squeeze every bit of political advantage it can from the Crozier story.
Congressman Smith has also described the situation in a colorful fashion as “The president has made it clear as far as he is concerned the single most important attribute that anybody in the federal government can have is a willingness to kiss the president’s ass as often as possible” which “undermines your ability to be competent, to make decisions based on what is the right thing to do as opposed to what is going to feed the president’s limitless ego.”
To be sure, Donald Trump is not about to change and if he is re-elected one can only expect four more years of the same, but public confidence in government can only be maintained if there is at least some belief that decision making is a rational process. Trump has clearly turned that axiom on its head in his tendency to blame other parts of the government for what are manifestly his own failings. His characterization of senior officials, many of whom he himself appointed, as “losers” casts the entire government in a bad light. Whether the strategy of divide and conquer within one’s own administration will work out for Trump will certainly be decided in November.
Philip Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest.

The Real Scandal of the Pandemic: Our Terrible Care for the Elderly
A huge number of the dead are coming from nursing homes.
May 9, 2020
by Michael Toscano
The American Conservative
This May is Older Americans Month, as declared by President Trump on April 30, in accord with the tradition established by President Kennedy in May 1963. In his declaration, Trump calls “upon all Americans to honor our elders, acknowledge their contributions, care for those in need, and reaffirm our country’s commitment to older Americans this month and throughout the year.”
You’d be forgiven for having never heard of Older Americans Month and for not being aware of Trump’s declaration. The welfare of the elderly is not considered a major civil rights issue in our national story, so, despite its place on the calendar, it just doesn’t get the play.
One hopes that will change. The timing of President Trump’s declaration, however accidental, is good. Among all the horrors that have visited us during this pandemic—mass unemployment, impoverishment, hunger, sickness, death—we can be thankful that, amidst this, American hearts have united in love for the elderly. As Governor of New York Andrew Cuomo put it on March 24, “My mother is not expendable. And your mother is not expendable.”
As early as March 9, before social distancing was nationally recommended and state lockdowns were mandated, Dr. Anthony Fauci was on Fox & Friends warning about the seriousness of COVID-19: “We know that the most vulnerable people in our society right now are those people with … underlying conditions, particularly the elderly.”
Fauci has been proved right. As Scott Atlas, Hoover Institution Senior Fellow, recently wrote, in an effort to make the case for reopening the economy, “Of Empire State fatalities, almost two-thirds were over 70 years of age.” That’s over 12,000 deaths in NYC alone. Statewide, that number is shooting up, with the recent reporting of 1,700 “previously undisclosed deaths” at nursing homes and other care facilities.
America went into lockdown to reduce as many such fatalities as possible. Saving the elderly and infirm was the logic of our collective action—and rightly so, for a good society protects its vulnerable. Still, passionate words are ringing hollow. When a government defends a key population from menace and its protective actions prove ineffective it should adjust its approach and provide the manpower and resources lacking in the defense. But this is not happening. Our leaders are failing.
Consider the case of Cuomo. Despite his own stated purpose for the shutdowns, he resisted sending protective equipment to nursing homes—”it’s not our job,” he said. He refused to establish guidelines that would make them safer, some as simple as requiring the ill to be quarantined. He declared himself unwilling to send elderly patients to the USNS Comfort, the naval hospital ship which has since departed from New York, where they might have received treatment. Shockingly, he has even mandated that nursing homes re-admit COVID-19 patients, with full knowledge of its potential effect. As if to put a grim point on it, despite absolving himself from the need to provide PPE, he made sure to send the readmitted patients with their very own body bags. (Similar mandates were established in California and New Jersey, but without the callousness.)
The result is predictable, and the scandals are mounting. The elderly are dying in New York nursing homes at catastrophic rates and the places ostensibly set aside to shield our precious loved ones have been used as trash heaps to throwaway the disposable. Tears fall when reading of the Isabella Geriatric Center in Manhattan, where, as of last count, 98 have died. The mass grave on Hart Island is being filled with our elderly. On a national level, Phil Kerpen’s research, which synthesizes the latest in state-level data, shows that, of the nearly 76,726 deaths nationwide, 32,204 can be shown to be nursing home deaths. And this with certain states lacking in punctuality and some not reporting at all. That’s 42 percent of deaths with incomplete reportage. In reality, the number is far higher.
On April 28, 2020, The New York Times ran a revealing op-ed by Richard Mollot of the Long Term Care Community Coalition, which argues that neglect and deteriorated conditions in nursing homes made fertile ground for infection. According to Mollot, “one million to three million serious infections occur every year in nursing homes and other long-term-care facilities, and as many as 380,000 people die of those infections every year.” In other words, we regularly subject our elderly—grandmothers, grandfather, mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters, loved ones—to conditions so horrendous that there was no way a virus could be stopped. That neglect has become a political problem. Or, really, it always was and the pandemic is only revealing it.
But festering wounds do not absolve our elected officials of their current failures. Governors should not “ration” equipment and should instead take responsibility for the provision of gear that dampens the spread of the virus. When in nursing homes, elderly who are ill with COVID-19 must be immediately quarantined and not left among those who do not have the virus. And fellow community members and their families have a right to be alerted to the presence of the ill. This should be obvious.
I do not intend to single out Cuomo or absolve the president. In President Trump’s recent townhall before the Lincoln Memorial, he was asked, based on the declared reason for our lockdowns, perhaps the key question: “what will be done, both in the short-term and in the long-term, to protect the vulnerable in nursing homes, senior housing, and assisted living centers?”
Trump’s answer was dodgy. He began strongly, by calling these places “ground zero” for the virus, a phrase he repeated. He commented on the ferocity and contagiousness of COVID-19. He mused about the deadliness of the Spanish Flu and how the subject of the 1918 pandemic is hot right now. And then he concluded by saying that responsibility falls to the governors.
This may, technically, be true. The governors run the hospitals and state-run nursing homes, and have near-total authority over the running of private business, including private care facilities. But the president can leverage funding in forthcoming legislation. And though he doesn’t run the states, he casts a national vision over them.
For example, in the case of Opening Up America Again—well received by both left and right—Trump’s guidelines for “reopening the economy” create a standard by which the actions of the governors can be judged. Now that we are certain that nursing homes are the key battleground in the effort to defeat the virus, one would think that steps to “reopen the economy” would require specific preparations for making such facilities safe. Yet, in Opening Up America Again, only social distancing and shelter in place are recommended for the vulnerable. But these have already proven to be insufficient measures to protect nursing home residents.
What’s going on here? Why the hard neglect of the same communities we are supposedly moving heaven and earth to protect?
Old negligence dies hard. I’m not a conspiratorial type, so, in seeing the sheer mismatch between image and reality, I sense no plot afoot. Even with this stirring of national conscience, the elderly are just not that meaningful to a society that values efficiency and power above all else. So, despite their speechifying, it appears our leaders wrote off the nursing homes as lost from the get-go. Some mothers, it turns out, are more expendable than others.
It’s not too late. Course correction is possible. We must fight off moral inertia by providing our nursing homes with the materials and personnel they need. Give them the PPE. As rapid tests become increasingly available, prioritize their use at these facilities. Above all, collaboration between the governors and the president in outfitting and securing them should match the high pitch of urgency with which they supported our hospitals. Nursing homes are, after all, ground zero.
But let our ambitions be higher still. As the year progresses, let’s be creative in how we use rapid tests to serve our elderly, who languish in isolation and fear. Instead of consigning them to endless quarantine, let’s give them a social and even a public life.
Here’s an idea, and likely not the best. For those who are mobile, set aside areas in public parks and beaches for their use, places where the virus has difficulty surviving. Using rapid test to confirm their health, admit them as well as loved ones. Give them healthy drivers who can take them to and from. If we can build a hospital in Central Park in the span of a weekend, we can do this, too.
We cannot leave our elderly locked away. We just need the political will and enduring love to make this happen. Our mothers deserve nothing less.
Michael Toscano is executive director of The Institute for Family Studies.

Handling of Coronavirus Threatens a Long Unemployment Crisis
May 7, 2020
by Jacob Leibenluft and Andres Vinelli
American Progress
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released employment numbers for April that showed a tragic and historic increase in unemployment. The economy experienced an unprecedented loss of 20.5 million jobs in April, bringing the unemployment rate to 14.7 percent. But while this is the highest unemployment rate the United States has seen since the Great Depression, it almost certainly understates the extent of job losses. The BLS noted that 9.9 million additional people were not counted as unemployed because they were not actively looking for work during the last four weeks or were not able to take a job. Employment as a share of the population dropped 8.7 percentage points to 51.3 percent, record numbers both in terms of the percentage drop and the absolute level. Indeed, when one includes discouraged jobseekers and part-time workers seeking full-time employment, the unemployment rate increases to 22.8 percent. And we know that more than 7 million additional people have applied for unemployment insurance benefits since the BLS conducted its April survey.*
While the immediate cause of this spike in joblessness is, of course, the necessary stay-at-home orders and social distancing measures taken to respond to the crisis, the rise in unemployment—and how long it lasts—cannot be separated from choices made by the Trump administration. In understanding the state of the economy, as well as what comes next, the following three elements of this crisis must be understood:
The economic crisis we are facing—and the economic pain we expect in the months ahead—is the result of a failed public health response. The Trump administration ignored early warnings, misled the public, and made the coronavirus crisis worse. The fact that the administration bungled the testing regime early on in the crisis meant that the United States could never contain the virus, as other countries such as South Korea, New Zealand, and Taiwan have done. As a consequence of that failure, the United States has had to engage in social distancing that has meant economic shock in order to avoid significantly greater levels of infections and deaths. The depth and scope of the economic pain being felt is a consequence of the administration’s delayed response and complete failure take leadership during this crisis.
The administration’s inability to put in place appropriate public health measures going forward—combined with its insistence that efforts to contain the virus should be lifted in the absence of those measures—is likely to not only prolong the public health crisis but also extend the economic pain. Rather than provide workers, businesses, and families the confidence that they can return to activity safely, the administration is taking steps that try to ignore the risk of infection, such as absolving employers of responsibility for worker safety through a liability shield or forcing workers to return to work even when they have concerns about their health. In this environment, we are likely to see decreased demand for some time to come because people will have little confidence in individual state reopening strategies disconnected from science—as we are already seeing across the country.
By rejecting efforts that would support families, workers, and communities during this crisis, the administration and its allies in Congress are putting us on a path for continued double-digit unemployment even after the pandemic finally ends. Indeed, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that the unemployment rate—absent additional action—will be near 10 percent at the end of 2021, several months after they project social distancing as a result of the health crisis abates. By opposing efforts to provide sufficient aid to states and localities; relief to families and unemployed workers; and assistance to those struggling the most, President Donald Trump, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), and their allies are insisting on making this extended period of double-digit unemployment a reality.
There is an alternative path, however: Taking the necessary steps to address the public health crisis and ensure that people can go back to work safely and doing what is needed to address the immediate economic pain and avoid prolonged unemployment. As Congress and the administration consider an additional stimulus package, they should put in place necessary public health protections while providing robust aid to families, workers, and communities for as long as the crisis lasts. This will allow us to avoid double-digit unemployment from being a devastating reality for American families for the next year and a half or more.
Public health failures has driven unemployment up
The rise in unemployment over the past two months is a direct consequence of the public health crisis—one that could have taken a far less severe toll under an administration that had been better prepared for it and that had approached it more wisely. The Trump administration has failed to develop an evidence-based plan to end the coronavirus crisis. Instead, its mismanagement has resulted in widespread fear and uncertainty as to when it might be appropriate to reopen parts of the economy. President Trump did not take the pandemic seriously when cases first emerged in the United States; his administration failed to use the month of April—when the nation was largely shut down—to ramp up the testing, contact tracing, and other pieces necessary for the public health response. And now, Trump is pushing states to reopen too soon. Before people feel comfortable enough to once again venture out of their homes and reengage in work and other economic activities, we need to ensure the country has developed the necessary health infrastructure to allow us to gradually reopen our economy without sparking a second wave of infections.
The economic crisis cannot end until public health crisis is solved
The Trump administration and its allies are arguing that the way to solve the economic crisis is to open up the country, ending stay-at-home orders and engaging in aggressive efforts to force business to return to normal. But in the absence of public health measures that actually allow activity to return safely, the administration’s strategy appears to be one of “ignore and press on,” with potentially devastating results for workers and communities. This strategy includes:
Pushing communities to lift stay-at-home orders and other public health measures before sufficient testing, tracing, isolation and ongoing surveillance is in place
Forcing workers back on the job, even without sufficient personal protective equipment or workplace safety protections—whether by removing unemployment insurance for those who are recalled to unsafe situations or through executive actions such as those taken for the meatpacking industry
Proposing to absolve employers of the responsibility to keep workers and communities safe through blanket immunity from liability—a measure that would do nothing to keep workers safe or build confidence in economic reopening
These steps reflect an acceptance of elevated risks of transmission, and ultimately, death. And despite the president’s rhetoric, it will make it less likely that the economy can return faster.
First, it is clear that the public isn’t going to feel safe to return to normal economic activity absent additional public health measures. A recent Washington Post-University of Maryland poll found that “67 percent say they would be uncomfortable shopping at a retail clothing store, and 78 percent would be uncomfortable eating at a sit-down restaurant.” These results were similar both in states that had loosened restrictions and those that had not and is consistent with other data. As long as people are anxious that returning to normal activities could put them at risk of contracting the virus, the economy will be unable to recover.
Second, a strategy that fails to put in place the necessary protections against spreading the virus will increase transmission among the public, and especially workers, in ways that may force additional shutdowns and prolong the period of public health crisis. In sum, prolonged public health crisis equals a prolonged state of economic distress—extending the number of months with a job market like April’s. The best approach—an approach adopted by other countries who are faring better both with their health outcomes and their economic impacts—is a national plan to fight the virus that is based on testing, tracing, and isolation.
After the pandemic ends, double-digit unemployment will persist under the current course
The CARES act provided large, necessary relief to most Americans, including assistance for workers, families, and small businesses. But this assistance will run out before the economic emergency is behind us, forcing the economy into unnecessarily prolonged hardship.
Indeed, the measures in the CARES Act both leave important gaps and will expire long before the economy is expected to return to normal. States and localities are facing extreme budget shortfalls. If action is not taken before state budget deadlines on July 1, states are likely to begin implementing layoffs of teachers and first responders and service cuts in the coming months that will cause additional job loss. Expanded unemployment insurance benefits expire at the end of July, removing an important lifeline for those out of work. While the direct payments in the CARES Act provided important assistance to families, the $1,200 per person payment will not be enough to sustain households through a prolonged crisis. The initial Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) support for small businesses has run out, and a second round of funding may soon run out too. And in important areas such as housing, food assistance, child care, and health coverage, among others, the CARES Act failed to do enough to address the hardship being felt today, let alone over a prolonged crisis—even as it provided generous aid to corporations.
As a result, under baseline projections—those that assume no further action on the part of the government—double-digit unemployment is expected to be a feature of the economy for at least the next year and a half. As noted above, the CBO estimates that the unemployment rate will remain near 10 percent at the end of 2021—many months after they predict that social distancing due to the pandemic itself ends.
Yet the Trump administration and congressional Republicans have indicated that they are prepared to accept this reality, or at best, offer solutions that do nothing to shift it. White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett said that another round of coronavirus relief legislation might not be necessary, and chief economic adviser Larry Kudlow said on Sunday that nothing has been decided yet and that “there’s kind of a pause period right now” and that “we will wait and see.” Senator McConnell has dismissed state and local aid as a “blue state bailout,” despite pain being felt in all states.
To the extent the administration or its allies have signaled a desire to act, they have focused on measures that would be woefully insufficient to address the economic challenges we face. Aside from the liability shield, Trump has signaled a push for poorly targeted corporate tax cuts or a payroll tax cut that would fail to benefit those who are out of work. An illustrative example of Trump’s approach is his call for removing limits on corporate deductions for meals and entertainment—effectively allowing companies to deduct expenses for sports tickets, golf trips, or visits to casinos—which would provide a benefit to corporations and their wealthiest executives but do little to help put money in the hands of those who need it.
A better path: a response that meets the public health and economic challenge
As it considers another package to address this crisis, Congress has the opportunity to take a path that rejects double-digit unemployment as a lasting feature of this crisis. The approach Congress should take would allow economic activity to restart safely and ensure that, as the economy restarts, we are actually getting people back to work rather than accepting a recession that keeps millions unemployed.
First, that requires a sufficient public health response. The purpose of stay-at-home orders in the first place was to suppress transmission to low levels and buy time to put in place extensive testing and contact tracing programs, but we have yet to meet those goals. Nationally, we still need to increase our testing capacity and reach at least 500,000 tests a day; scale up contact tracing—both manually and by apps that meet privacy standards—in order to isolate people who test positive as well as their contacts; and have in place a far more robust disease surveillance system.
And second, it requires an economic response that offers relief that both addresses immediate pain that families, small businesses, and communities are facing and is sufficient to build back to a stronger economy.
In particular, the package must be:
At a scale necessary to address the crisis. We need to pursue a fiscal response that is proportional to both the public health and economic threat posed by COVID-19. The economic consequences of this crisis are staggering. Children are going hungry; households are piling massive debts; millions of homeowners are delaying their mortgage payments; small businesses in hard hit states received fewer loans than others; minority small business owners are struggling to stay open; and state and local governments are preparing for significant layoffs of teachers and first responders in the absence of federal aid. Action needs to be sufficiently large to both address the immediate hardship that families are facing and get the economy back to work. This big push for aid has to be coordinated at the national, state, and local levels. An important lesson form the Great Recession was that austerity at the level of states and localities was a key factor in delaying economic recovery for years, since states were in austerity mode from 2008 until 2012, contributing to lower GDP growth. And, in contrast to concerns raised by some congressional Republicans—concerns that were absent during the passage of nearly $2 trillion in tax cuts in 2017—we have the fiscal capacity to respond robustly, especially with interest rates near zero. Indeed, evidence suggests that increased fiscal stimulus may increase fiscal sustainability.
Sustained for the duration of the crisis. Relief must be sustained, automatic, and available with certainty for as long as it is needed. We should learn from the Great Recession, when stimulus was insufficient and removed too soon. During that crisis, unemployment insurance expired for many workers long before the crisis had passed; fiscal aid ended long before state and fiscal budget cuts ceased being a drag on the recovery. Key measures to support the economy, such as unemployment insurance, state and local aid, and direct relief to families, should automatically extend for the duration of the economic crisis—ensuring that we are providing sufficient relief and necessary stimulus as long as is needed to support a robust recovery.
Targeted to all the areas where Americans are feeling economic hardship. There is no silver bullet that will bring the economy back. We need a multilayered attack that addresses the root cause of the problem—the spread of the virus—and ameliorates its symptoms in the form of hardship for families, workers, small businesses, and communities. Building off the CARES Act, additional aid needs to make sure it is reaching those who have been excluded. That requires ensuring that aid is more completely available—for example, ensuring that immigrant families can access needed relief or closing loopholes that prevent workers from having access to paid leave. It also means providing much needed assistance in areas such as food assistance, child care, housing, and for people with disabilities—areas that would both address concentrated harm and support the economy going forward. Finally, the package should be designed so that—rather than exacerbating structural problems in our economy that benefited corporations over workers—it puts us on a path for a stronger economy once the crisis ends.
The administration and its allies appear content to accept a prolonged period of public health and economic harm that is a result of the mismanagement of the COVID-19 crisis to date—essentially condemning the nation to a greater toll from the virus itself and a much longer period of economic distress. It must be clear that the harsh reality of the April jobs report—and the much broader pain that has been felt over recent weeks—was the result of both failed policy decisions and mismanagement. By the same token, we have the choice going forward as to whether we accept further pain or take steps that would both keep people healthy and get Americans back to work.
Jacob Leibenluft is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. Andres Vinelli is the vice president for Economic Policy at American Progress.

Stop Letting Jared Run Things
May 5, 2020
by Sarah Jones
New York Magazine
The world would be a safer place if Jared Kushner’s parents had not purchased him a place at Harvard. But they did, and here we are, in desperate need of a functional pandemic response — and forced to rely on Kushner, who believes, without evidence, that he should be the one in charge of it. Inside the shelter of the White House, the myth of Jared Kushner’s competence is self-sustaining. Viewed from the outside, matters look a lot more shambolic. Kushner, who once bragged about reading “25 books” to solve the Israel-Palestine conflict, and then didn’t solve it, now leads the Trump administration’s effort to respond to the coronavirus. It’s not going well.
According to a whistle-blower complaint, Kushner has populated his response team with volunteers who have little to no experience in the problems they were recruited to solve. “The document alleges that the team responsible for PPE had little success in helping the government secure such equipment, in part because none of the team’s members had significant experience in health care, procurement or supply-chain operations,” the Washington Post reported on Tuesday. Right-wing journalists, including Fox & Friends host Brian Kilmeade, enjoyed a direct line to the team, which allowed them to pass along tips or advice as the fancy took them.
This is all fairly typical for the Trump administration, and for Kushner’s performance in particular. The president is heavily reliant on his son-in-law despite the latter’s record of failure. The fact that Kushner advised Trump repeatedly that the media had exaggerated the threat of coronavirus is but one of his many errors. Before the pandemic, Trump tasked him to create a peace plan for Israel and Palestine, which, again, has not worked, partly because Kushner’s strategy was to blame Palestinians for the entire conflict.
Kushner defended his pet project to the Post, saying that it had “sourced tens of millions of masks and essential PPE in record time and Americans who needed ventilators received ventilators.” His volunteers, he added, were “true patriots.” But a national PPE shortage persists, and as the Post notes, the effort to gather masks and gloves has at times come into conflict with another Kushner-led effort to create more testing sites for probable COVID-19 patients. Kushner “promised thousands of testing sites, but only 78 materialized; the [PPE] stockpile was used to supply 44 of those over five to 10 days,” claimed another internal White House document obtained by the Post.
Trump either doesn’t care about Kushner’s failures, or is simply unable to view them as failures at all. The nepotism that lifted up Kushner is, in the end, an extension of Trump’s own narcissism. The president seems to believe little but the tale of his own acumen. The consequences of his self-delusion are broad. The lie sold by The Apprentice, the TV show which catapulted Trump to household fame, wasn’t just that he had a great mind for deals. Trump was the Ur-boss because he could recognize talent and draw it to him. He would only tolerate the sharpest wits. Trump accepts this as gospel, and so, years later, we get Kushner the wunderkind. No reason exists to think that Kushner is anything but the mediocre offspring of wealth — a quality he shares with his father-in-law. But he married Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, and can string a sentence together in public, so he must possess preternatural executive skills. Trump, after all, will only work with the best.
Back in reality, thousands are dying, and Kushner is incapable of help. He has no background in public health, just as he had no background in diplomacy, and in a true meritocracy, he would push papers in a place where he could do no harm. His chief concerns should be his tee time, the weight of his business cards, the fit of his suits. But the authorities in his life keep promoting him far beyond his capacities, and Americans bear the burden of their arrogance. If the White House really does wind down the coronavirus task force overseen by the office of Vice-President Mike Pence, as the New York Times reported on Tuesday, then Kushner’s dubious Team America is all we’ve got left.

Innovation Should Be Made in the U.S.A.
Offshoring by American companies has destroyed our manufacturing base and our capacity to develop new products and processes. It’s time for a national industrial policy.
November 15, 2019
by Sridhar Kota and Tom Mahoney
WSJ
In 1987, as the Reagan administration was nearing its end, the economists Stephen S. Cohen and John Zysman issued a prophetic warning: “If high-tech is to sustain a scale of activity sufficient to matter to the prosperity of our economy…America must control the production of those high-tech products it invents and designs.” Production, they continued, is “where the lion’s share of the value added is realized.”
Amid the offshoring frenzy that began in the late 1980s, this was heterodox thinking. In many quarters, it still is. Even as trade tensions with China have deepened, many U.S. political and economic leaders continue to believe that offshoring is not only profitable but also sound economic strategy. Manufacturing in China is cheaper, quicker and more flexible, they argue.
With China’s networks of suppliers, engineers and production experts growing larger and more sophisticated, many believe that locating production there is a better bet in terms of quality and efficiency. Instead of manufacturing domestically, the thinking goes, U.S. firms should focus on higher-value work:”innovate here, manufacture there.”
Today many Americans are rightly questioning this perspective. From the White House to Congress, from union halls to university laboratories, there is a growing recognition that we can no lnger afford the outsourcing paradigm. Once manufacturing departs from a country’s shores, engineering and production now-how leave as well, and innovation ultimately follows. It’s become increasingly clear that “manufacture there” not means “innovate there.”
What’s the solution? It’s time for the U.S. to adopt an industrial policy for the century ahead- not a throwback to the old ideas of state planning but a program for helping Americans to compete with foreign manufacturers and maintain our ever more precarious edge in innovation.
Consider the results of the original offshoring craze of the 1960’s, which centered on consumer electronics. The development of modern transistors, the establishment of standardized shipping containers and creation of inexpensive assembly lines in East Asia cut costs for consumers and created huge markets for televisions and radios; it also catalyzed the Asian manufacturing miracle. Though American federal research investment in the decades that followed enabled the invention of game-changing technologies such as the magnetic storage drive, the lithium-ion battery and the liquid crystal display, the country had, by then, already let go of consumer electronics manufacturing. Asia dominated.
Since the turn of the millennium, the off-shoring trend has accelerated, thanks to China’s entry into the World Trade Organization and major investments in workforce and production capacity by other Asian nations. U.S.-based companies began to contract out both design and product-development work. A 2015 study by the consulting firms Strategy& and PwC found that U.S. companies across sectors have been moving R&D to China to be closer to production, suppliers and engineering talent- not just to reap lower costs and more dynamic markets. An estimated 50% of overseas-backed R&D centers in China have been established by U.S. companies.
Innovation in manufacturing gravitates to where the factories are. American manufacturers have learned that the applied research and engineering necessary to introduce new products, enhance existing designs and improve production processes are best done near the factories themselves. As more engineering and design work has shifted to China, many U.S. companies have a diminished capability to perform those tasks here.
Manufacturing matters- especially for a high-tech economy. While it’s still possible to argue that the offshoring of parts assembly and final production has worked well for multinational companies focused on quarterly earnings, it is increasingly clear that offshoring has devastated the small and medium-sized manufacturers that make up the nation’s supply chains and geographically diverse industrial clusters. While the share of such companies in the total population of U.S. manufacturers has risen, their absolute numbers have dropped by nearly 100,000 since the 1990’s and by 40,000 just in the last decade. Numbers have fallen in relatively high-technology industries such as computers, electronics, electrical equipment and machinery.
The loss of America’s industrial commons-the ecosystem of engineering skills, production know-how and comprehensive supply chains- has not just devastated industrial areas. It has also underined a core responsibility of government: providing for national defense. Recent Pentagon analyses of the defense industrial base have identified specific risks to weapons production, including fragile domestic suppliers, dependence on imports, counterfeit parts and material shortages. Meanwhile despite tariffs, manufacturing imports continue to set records, especially in advanced technology products. Dependence on imports had virtually eliminated the nation’s ability to manufacture large flat-screen displays, smartphones, many advanced materials and packaged semiconductors. The U.S. now lacks the capacity to manufacture many next-generation and emerging technologies.
This is to say nothing of the human suffering and sociopolitical upheaval that have resulted from the hollowing out of entire regional economies. Once vibrant communities in the so-called Rust Belt have lost population and income as large factories and their many supporting suppliers have closed. The shuttering last March of the GM plant in Lordstown, Ohio- resulting in the loss of some 1,400 high-paying manufacturing jobs- is just the latest example. It joins a list that includes most of the long-established furniture industry in North Carolina, large steel mills in places like Bethlehem, Penn., and Weirton, W.Va. and the machine tool industry that once clustered around Cincinnati. Real wages across the country have been stagnant for decades, and though the causes are debatable, he loss of manufacturing jobs and the dramatic decline in manufacturing productivity growth have certainly played major roles.
In terms of long-term competitiveness, the biggest strategic consequence of this profound decline in American manufacturing might be the loss of our ability to innovate- that is, to translate inventions into production. We have lost much of our capacity to physically build what results from out world-leading investments in research and development. A study of 150 production-related hardware startups that emerged from research at MIT found that most of them scaled up production offshore to get access to production capabilities, suppliers and lead customers. As for foreign multinationals, many participate in federally funded university research centers and then use what they learn in their factories abroad. LG, Sharp and Auo, for example, were partners in the flexible display research center at Arizona State University funded by the U.S. Army, but they do not manufacture displays here.
The slow destruction of the U.S. industrial eco-system is a clear case of market failure, and the government has an important role to play in remedying it. Thanks to continued federal funding in the sciences, the U.S. is still the best in the world in groundbreaking scientific discoveries and inventions. But the federal government must do more than invest in basic research; it must also fill the innovation deficit by creating a new infrastructure for R&D in engineering and manufacturing.
The American government invests about $150 billion annually in science and technology, significantly more than other advanced industrial nations. Yet relatively little of this is devoted to the translational R&D in engineering and manufacturing needed to turn basic research results into successful commercial products. Germany, Japan and South Korea spend three to six times as much as the U.S. on industrial and production technologies. These three advanced nations have high wages and strict regulations, and their energy costs and levels of automation are higher that in the U.S.
Historically, American companies have performed this essential translational research, but in the past two decades of cost cutting to maximize quarterly earnings, corporate R&D labs at GE,IBM, Xerox, AT&T and other industrial giants invented new products and production processes, ranging from semiconduictors and lasers to MRI machines and industrial robots. In too many industries, this translational R&D capability has been lost, or at least seriously downsized, and the U.S. has lost its leadership position.
Aerospace is the main counter example, where the U.S. continues to lead in advanced technology. It is the last major industry that has maintained a strong trade surplus. Not surprisingly, it is also more dependent on government customers- mostly the Department of Defense- and the beneficiary of substantial government R&D investments in basic and translational research. Though few would call it such, this amounts to a successful industrial policy to support an industry deemed critical to national defense. It’s an example that needs to be replicated.
Unless something is done, the weak U.S. industrial commons will continue to create incentives for American companies to manufacture offshore, innovate offshore and weaken national competitiveness. A strategic and coordinated national effort is needed that moves beyond tax and trade policy, which, so far at least, has not resulted in an American manufacturing resurgence.
This national effort- call it Industrial Policy 2.0- should focus on ensuring that hardware innovations are manufactured in this country. The idea is not to recover lost industries but to rebuild lost capabilities. The U.S. needs to leverage its dominance in science and technology to create future industries to provide us with first-mover advantages in reclaim American leadership in manufacturing.
The first step would be to create a new federal agency responsible for the health of U.S. manufacturing. A number of agencies currently have manufacturing-related programs, but there is little or no coordination or strategy. Defense alone cannot solve this challenge because defense procurement needs are dwarfed by commercial markets, and defense-specific technologies may have few commercial applications.
A new agency is needed to signal new priorities. This National Manufacturing Foundation, as it could be called, would be a cabinet-level agency focused on rebuilding America’s industrial commons and translating our scientific knowledge into new products and processes. What policies might it promote?
• To maximize the wealth and jobs created from our national R&D investments, the
results must be manufactured in the U.S. Any licensee of federally funded research resuts should be required to manufacture at least 75% of the value added in this country, with no exceptions and no waivers.
• An additional 5% of the federal science and technology budget should be invested in engineering and manufacturing R&D and process technologies. This included creating translational research centers as innovation hubs around the country. Affiliated with major research universities and institutions, these centers would take promising basic research results and perform the translational R&D necessary to demonstrate the viability of large-scale commercial production.
• Developing hardware typically requires more resources and time than developing software. Public-private partnerships could provide the needed patient capital. State-level programs in Massachusetts, Georgia and other states already provide encouraging examples, The South Carolina Research Authority, for example, provides grants, loans and didrect investments to a portfolio of companies, roug.ly 40% of which are manufacturers. Leveraging defense procurement and other federal spending would help too, as would the targeted use of Small Business Administration loans.
• Restoring innovation in domestic manufacturing will require much greater investments in human capital. The country needs significantly more graduate fellowships in engineering for qualified domestic students and many more four-year engineering technology programs that focus on application and implementation rather than concepts and theory. American multinationals need to do their part by revamping internship and apprenticeship probfams to fill the skills gap.
Industrial Policy 2.0 would not be the industrial policy discussed and often criticized in past decades, it would not pick winners and losers but would keep other countries from taking advantage of our winners; it would make sure the U.S., not its economic rivals, benefits from American know-how. The goal would be to maximize innovations in hardware technologies and, in doing so, to create high-value products, well-paying jobs, national wealth and national security.
Such steps are essential to generating a strong return on the U.S. taxpayer’s enormous investments in science and technology. For too long Americans have suffered from the self-inflicted wound of hollowing out our industrial capacity. Other countries have moved quickly to take our place, It’s time for the U.S. to act.