'$470 billion worth of investments': How manufacturing' has 'surged' under Biden

07 June 2023

Former President Donald Trump's supporters have been arguing that his focus on manufacturing jobs is a key reason to return him to the White House. MAGA Republicans have claimed that President Joe Biden dropped the ball with manufacturing, but on Tuesday, June 6, the Biden White House unveiled a new website, Invest.gov, in order to promote his track record with manufacturing and infrastructure.

The Associated Press' Josh Boak reports that Invest.gov "documents roughly 32,000 infrastructure projects and more than $470 billion worth of investments in the production of electric vehicles, batteries, computer chips, biotech, clean energy and other sectors."

"The president promoted the new website during a meeting Tuesday with his cabinet, as part of a larger effort to keep public attention on a string of legislative wins during Biden's first two years, when Democrats controlled both the House and Senate," Boak explains. "Following $1.9 trillion in pandemic relief, Biden signed a $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill into law."

In his June 6 column for the New York Times, liberal economist Paul Krugman emphasizes that when Trump and Biden's records on manufacturing are compared, Biden fares much better.

"As it turned out, Trump had no visible success in promoting manufacturing," Krugman argues. "But a funny thing has happened under his successor: Suddenly, investment in manufacturing has surged. What Trump's trade policies didn't achieve, President Biden's industrial policies have."

Krugman praises Biden's record on manufacturing as "stunning" and "really impressive," presenting a Bureau of Economic Analysis chart that highlights "manufacturing construction as a percentage of GDP" from 1993-2023. The chart shows 2022 and 2023 as the best years during that 30-year period.

"There's no real question about the causes of the surge," Krugman stresses. "It's being driven by two major pieces of legislation: the misleadingly named Inflation Reduction Act, whose actual core is subsidies for green energy, and the CHIPS Act.… The ultimate impact of these policies will almost surely be much bigger than these numbers suggest."

The NY Times columnist continues, "For one thing, planning and beginning work on new manufacturing plants takes time, so there’s probably even more spending in the pipeline. For another, these numbers count only construction — basically, factory buildings. Filling those buildings with machinery and investing in R&D to make the most of the new capacity will probably add hundreds of billions to the total business spending."

Find Paul Krugman's entire New York Times column at this link (subscription required) and AP's report here.

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