America absolutely needs a national manufacturing policy, urges Senator Brown
Race-Talk – As chairman of the Senate Banking Subcommittee on Economic Policy, Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH), has been a strong and consistent advocate for the middle class and working families.
Often described as “Congress’s leading proponent of American manufacturing,” he has been steadfastly working with the Obama administration on the creation of a national manufacturing policy.
Over the past year, Brown held a series of Subcommittee on Economic Policy hearings examining ways to rebuild U.S. manufacturing and is also fighting to ensure that our nation’s trade laws work for domestic manufacturing and American workers.
Kathleen Wells: Later this month or early in February, it is expected that the Senate will take up a jobs bill (Jobs for Main Street Act). How can Americans be certain that this bill will actually create jobs –actually put Americans back to work?
Senator Sherrod Brown: First of all, without the first Recovery Act, we would have been in a much worse economic position than we are in now. It clearly created jobs. Even though we were losing that number of jobs, it obviously created jobs in terms of direct spending on infrastructure. It created jobs by putting tens of billions of dollars in state and local governments so that they didn’t lay off teachers, firefighters, and mental health counselors, etc. — all the kinds of things that state and local governments funded. This jobs bill needs to do more direct infrastructure spending. We are facing a huge infrastructure deficit to pass on to our children. Water, sewer, highways, bridges, universities, broadband — all the things that we have not funded as well as what we should have, and have not built infrastructure well enough, is a huge problem for our children and grandchildren if we don’t do it right now.
Second, this bill needs to make sure that it’s got a manufacturing policy, so that we are moving forward in building wind turbines, solar panels, and other kinds of alternative energy manufacturing that this nation absolutely needs to do.
