Source: Blog – Alliance for American Manufacturing
Screenshot from Brookings Institution Youtube
President-elect Donald Trump has said that he plans to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act, but doing so would imperil the thousands of new factory jobs that are set to grow in Republican districts.
President Joe Biden warned that repealing much of the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy manufacturing incentives and programs, as proposed in Project 2025, would be “kind of a disaster for us,” in a speech at the Brookings Institute on Tuesday.
While echoing many of his presidential campaign talking points about growing the economy from “the middle out and the bottom up” through the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, Biden heralded his administration’s progress in reversing decades of offshoring American jobs. That progress stands at risk if the Trump administration hinders the millions upon millions of dollars that these landmark laws still have to invest in American manufacturing.
“The next president has a game plan I laid out,” Biden said. “And by the way, he’s going to find, since I made a promise I’d invest as much in red states as blue, he’s having trouble not doing it.”
Indeed, as CNN noted earlier this year, “red states have emerged as big winners from both the IRA and the CHIPS and Science Act.” Nearly 80% of the Inflation Reduction Act’s projects that are currently underway are in Republican districts, totaling to an investment of $243 billion. Another $435 billion-worth of projects have been announced in these districts, according to CNN analysis of data from the Rhodium Group and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Over the course of the Biden administration, private companies have announced $1 trillion in U.S. manufacturing investments, according to the White House. Factory jobs, unfortunately, have yet to fully match this boom and have stayed largely flat this year, a central conundrum that plagued Biden’s run for re-election.
Biden reflected on that pain point during his speech:
“In fact, and we knew in the beginning this wasn’t going to come to fruition in my campaign, my administration, it takes time to get this done. We watch 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 years from now we’ll soon be the only economy in the world to have all five of the major chip companies operating in the United States of America. It’s not only creating thousands, it will create thousands of jobs and good paying jobs and building chip factory. We’re always creating those jobs for workers, installing more solar panels, batteries, selling more electric vehicles than ever before. You know, that’s a construction boom and manufacturing all across America. It’s just going to continue to pick up with the billions of dollars being invested when facing unfair practice abroad.”
Despite the lack of public awareness of the Biden administration’s positive impact on American manufacturing, fully repealing its signature industrial investment laws may be an uphill battle and would undoubtedly damage the U.S. manufacturing renaissance.
“Show me the most conservative Republicans willing to take away the factories are going to be built in their states,” Biden challenged.
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