Tackle unemployment, trade, manufacturing and environment: Invest in green infrastructure

More than 42 million workers have filed unemployment claims during the coronavirus pandemic, the jobless rate is over 13% and minorities are bearing a disproportionate share of the economic pain, just as people have taken to the streets to protest racial injustice — but there's a clear path forward for America. We must create millions of new jobs by investing in an infrastructure-led recovery through federal legislation. 

Just as we did in the 1930s New Deal and the 1950s Interstate Highway System, in the 1960s through NASA and in the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, we can rebuild the foundation of America’s economic future while creating millions of jobs today.

To be most effective at helping workers, such economic recovery and infrastructure legislation should include large investments in clean manufacturing, which will be the fastest growing manufacturing sector in coming years, attracting $10 trillion in investment globally by 2050. A new report from the Progressive Policy Institute finds that means putting Americans to work building tens of millions of new electric vehicles, charging stations, and creating advanced electric grids, as well as upgrading our roads, bridges, high-speed internet, ports, and public transport.

Republicans are stalling

This will require new consumer tax incentives for Americans to buy dozens of U.S.-made advanced energy products like electric vehicles, and direct government purchase of electric buses, trucks, and other new clean technology goods to jump-start private sector jobs, cut pollution and address climate change. We must also train workers in technology and manufacturing skills through high schools and struggling community colleges, focused where unemployment is highest, both in cities and rural areas, in direct cooperation with employers.

Democrats in Congress are unified around these goals. Even before the COVID-19 crisis, Joe Biden proposed a $1.3 trillion clean infrastructure plan to boost U.S. jobs creation and manufacturing. Just this week, House Transportation and Infrastructure Chairman Peter DeFazio introduced major infrastructure legislation as part of a five-year, $760 billion House Democratic framework. Now the economic crisis means these efforts should be expanded, with more job-creating investment.

But in Washington, Republicans are stalling. Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell has the gall to suggest we can’t afford an economic recovery and jobs bill modernizing our roads, factories and bridges, and making upgrades like high-speed internet available everywhere, even as tens of millions are out of work.

Remarkably, the Trump administration has purposely suffocated Democratic attempts to create clean manufacturing jobs. In December, Trump killed congressional efforts to extend electric vehicle tax credits above 200,000 units per company, meaning consumers no longer get $7,500 credit for purchasing GM-produced cars, costing workers jobs and pay checks. 

Yet the rapid retooling at GM and Ford to build ventilators and masks to address the COVID-19 crisis illustrates the ability of automakers to adapt to new market demands and government incentives.

What would FDR do? We need a new WPA to fight massive unemployment in the coronavirus era.

Other sectors have similar job-creating opportunities, but are being blocked by Trump. A heating and cooling industry study found that new federal energy efficiency and emissions standards would create 33,000 new American manufacturing jobs making air conditioners and refrigeration products, adding $12.5 billion annually to the economy. But Republicans killed the legislation even though most in Congress support it, and these jobs will otherwise go to China.

Trump's broken economic promises

In his 2016 campaign, Donald Trump famously made two promises: to revitalize American manufacturing, and rebuild our crumbling infrastructure. But as president, he has done neither one.

In fact, U.S. manufacturing declined deeply during each quarter of 2019, long before the coronavirus onset. The manufacturing collapse was especially severe in the Great Lakes industrial states and now has been compounded by coronavirus-related shutdowns. An analysis by two leading Federal Reserve economists finds that the Trump tariffs are causing U.S. “reductions in manufacturing employment and relative increases in producer prices” while “tariffs have not boosted manufacturing employment or output.”

Trump and congressional Republicans have also ignored years of Democratic calls for job-creating infrastructure legislation, instead spending $2 trillion on a massive tax giveaway to corporations and the wealthy that added to our debt without actually helping the real economy and workers.

Economics for a post-lockdown world: Invest now to prevent another Great Depression

Meanwhile China continues to walk away with contracts, production and jobs. China controls 73% of the world’s lithium ion electric vehicle battery market, the key electric vehicle technology, compared to the U.S. with just 12% of the battery market. That’s not good enough.

America still has time to gain huge market share in electric vehicles and many other clean energy technologies, if we act quickly. But Trump and other Republicans still say there’s “no rush” for economic stimulus.  

If Republicans will not act, then Joe Biden and Democrats should make these jobs and economic competitiveness issues a centerpiece of the 2020 election debate. We need a muscular new vision of a clean infrastructure and manufacturing sector with millions of good new jobs that help all Americans. This is the modern equivalent of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “Arsenal of Democracy” — helping to solve many of our economic, employment, manufacturing, trade and environmental problems together.

Paul Bledsoe is strategic adviser at the Progressive Policy Institute in Washington. He served as staff member in the US House of Representatives, Senate Finance Committee, and Clinton White House. Follow him on Twitter: @paulbledsoe