Days before Michelle Obama jetted off to her lavish vacation in Spain, her husband the president visited a General Motors plant in Hamtramck, Michigan. Defending his policy of nationalizing GM and Chrysler, Barack Obama described the auto industry as “what has been the heart and soul of American manufacturing, what has built a middle class not just here in Detroit, but all throughout the Midwest, what has made us proud and has been a symbol of our economic power.” With that, Obama revealed his obsession with manufacturing.
While other presidents have shared this unhealthy fixation -- see George W. Bush’s Manufacturing in America strategy -- Obama has raised it to another level. Manufacturing has been on a more-or-less-steady decline as a share of national output for decades, part of the natural evolution of the U.S. economy. It’s time politicians stop calling this a national crisis. Lots of firms went bankrupt during the recession without the federal government sweeping in to save them. Big manufacturing firms had to be rescued because of their symbolic power. Massive government intervention, it seems, is advisable to save the auto industry because manufacturing output is somehow more valuable than other types of output. Like the rest of Obama’s economic policy, the foundation for this idea is nonexistent. Small wonder his economists are quitting. Read more here:
Posts
0 comments:
Post a Comment