President Joe Biden’s supply chain crisis continues as the CEO of the American Trucking Association recently announced that they are short 80,000 truck drivers. Critics have pointed the labor shortage to Biden’s far-left policies of paying people large amounts to stay home. While Biden signed an executive order to allow the ports to be open 24 hours and have truckers working around the clock, he has not done much to fix the national supply chain crisis. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has also been missing from the crisis, as he took paternity leave to raise his two children.
Things have gotten so bad that some politicians are even introducing their own bills to curb the crisis. Sen. Josh Hawley just introduced the “Make in America to Sell in America Act,” which would require multinational corporations to work within the U.S to increase the production of goods in the country and sell from within. He said it would help the country’s “over-reliance on foreign factories” and ensure that a supply chain crisis would not happen.
Hawley goes on to say that the COVID-19 pandemic “revealed” to the degree to which the United States is dependent on the People’s Republic of China for certain critical manufactured goods. He said, “excessive globalization” has been a disaster for United States workers in the manufacturing sector and that the erosion of the domestic industrial base is due to a “lack of adequate protection” for domestic industry and U.S workers.
“The United States currently mandates domestic sourcing by requiring certain government agencies to purchase only goods that are produced in whole or in part in the United States. It is the sense of Congress that a targeted regime of local content requirements across manufactured goods sold in the United States should be deployed to boost domestic industry, repatriate supply chains, and nurture infant industries,” the bill states.
The bill reports that 60,000 factories have shuttered in the United States since 2001 and calls to require certain manufactured goods be “introduced for sale” in the U.S. It requests that it has a domestic value content of more than 50% and for other purposes, adding that it be enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives in Congress.
The bill uses the term “introduce for sale” to mean the import of goods into the United States of the production of goods for consumption in the United States. It goes on to add that a year after the enactment of the Bill, the Secretary of Commerce and Secretary of Defense will meet at Congress with a public report that identifies “finished goods and intermediate goods” in the domestic production. It emphasizes how this report would be “critical” for the protection of national security in the United States and to which extent the global supply chain is vulnerable.
“Joe Biden’s supply chain crisis is getting worse with every passing day, straining the finances of working Americans who have already been forced to endure so much over the past year and a half. Biden’s policies have given us empty shelves and rising prices across the country. It’s past time for the U.S. to end its crippling dependency on foreign manufacturing in countries like China and ensure that we actually produce the goods we need here at home,” Hawley said.
The first problem for politicians to handle is getting people back to work. The White House has continued to defend Biden and Buttigieg while still considering whether to deploy the National Guard. Between packed unemployment benefits and pushing the fear of a widespread pandemic, Democrats have the people right where they want them. At home – so they can do whatever they want.
