I spent last week in rural North Carolina, where my family owns an old home. This is an area that has been devastated by the loss of manufacturing over the years. But, as I visited with friends at the local hardware store, I was surprised the local chatter had turned decidedly optimistic. Growth was coming. Here I was in the heart of Trump country, but I was hearing about the impact of legislation spearheaded by the Biden-Harris administration that I and others helped pass in 2021 and 2022: the bipartisan infrastructure bill, the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS and Science Act.
Economic issues have been tough for Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for president, but she has a strong case to make. She just needs to make it. I don’t know if people in these small towns make the connection between the painful negotiations and legislation that passed in Washington and the investment pouring into their community — and how very easily former President Donald Trump could choke this off if reelected.
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
Inflation usually drives conversations on the economy, and Republicans like to blame it on too much federal spending by Democrats. But voters need to be reminded that when President Joe Biden and Harris took office in 2021, the country had been devastated by the coronavirus. Eighty thousand people died the month Biden was sworn in, an all-time high. Even though unemployment was technically at 6.3%, the economy was largely being kept afloat by massive federal subsidies to individuals and businesses through programs such as the Paycheck Protection Program.
Almost every country in the world experienced inflation as leaders tried to stabilize their economies in the wake of the pandemic. Now, the United States has one of the lowest inflation rates in the developed world, and interest rates are going down. Further, though a certain subset of Republicans still care about fiscal responsibility, Trump emphatically does not. He contributed far more to the federal debt than Biden did, even accounting for coronavirus relief packages. There is no reason to think that post-coronavirus inflation under Trump would have been any better; quite possibly, it would have been far worse.
Trump’s proposed economic policies are also highly likely to wreak havoc on the economy if he’s elected. Most notably, Trump is proposing a 10% across-the-board tariff (read: tax increase) on all goods that are imported from any other country, and a 60% tariff on all goods from China. Tariffs will provoke retaliatory tariffs from other countries on our goods. Recall that when Trump imposed his relatively limited tariffs on China last time, former Georgia Gov. and then-U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue had to scramble to find billions in taxpayer subsidies to save segments of Georgia’s agricultural industry from annihilation because of retaliatory tariffs imposed by China. Almost every credible economist projects this one-two punch would at the least increase costs for American consumers. In actuality, we haven’t tried tariffs this extreme since the Smoot-Hawley Act, which helped precipitate the Great Depression in the 1930s.
Meanwhile, the major theme and success of the Biden-Harris administration has been rebuilding our manufacturing economy for the 21st century. The local hardware store in my grandmother’s hometown is owned by a friend of mine who got her start working as a manager for a local textile mill in the early 1990s. She moved up in management until she reached her last project: moving the mills out of North Carolina to China. She was offered a job elsewhere in the company, but she decided to stay near her family. Now her family business and a tiny U.S. post office are the only going concerns in town. The main street used to have tidy homes lining the street; now, it’s semi-abandoned. Many of the houses have been bulldozed. The community has been devastated by methamphetamine, fentanyl and violent crime.
But last week when I visited, the buzz was all about massive investments in a battery manufacturing plant, a semiconductor plant and an electric vehicle plant, all within commuting distance. These are facilities similar in scale and scope to the Hyundai plant outside of Savannah or SK Industries battery plant in Commerce. With this growth, there is the need for huge tracts of housing to support the workforce for these companies, and the road outside my friend’s store is slated to become an interstate highway.
For the first time in a generation, the United States is implementing an industrial policy to rebuild manufacturing in this country. Benefiting from the Inflation Reduction Act, the bipartisan infrastructure bill and the CHIPS Act, North Carolina and Georgia are seeing an explosion of investment. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, in a recent visit to Georgia, called the state “the tip of the spear” in the global transition to clean energy. The jobs that come with these investments are going to regions devastated by the loss of manufacturing over the past 40 years, not to metro Atlanta or other big cities. These jobs are going to Trump country, even as Trump has pledged to terminate the incentives that underpin these investments.
There is more to be done. But for the first time in a generation, I see hope for my grandmother’s old community and so many like it throughout Georgia and the South. For his entire term, Trump talked about infrastructure and rebuilding American manufacturing. It became a running joke that every week was “infrastructure week,” but he never actually got the job done. Biden and Harris did.
Biden and Harris pulled this country out of the tailspin caused by the coronavirus pandemic. Even more, they made the tough choices and passed the legislation to bring hope to people in unexpected places — like my grandmother’s old hometown. Now Kamala Harris and Tim Walz need to deliver the message that they are not just about suburbanites or city dwellers. They are about hope and change for us all.
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