This weekend, The Wall Street Journal wrote that “America Is Back in the Factory Business,” citing President Biden’s work as “stoking the [manufacturing] frenzy.”
The Journal noted that the Biden-Harrhis Administration, “seeing electric vehicles and semiconductors as matters of national security, has devoted billions of dollars to expanding those industries in the U.S.”
However, as President Biden travels the country to promote this resurgence in American manufacturing that his leadership is driving, the only budget vision that House Republicans have offered would gut the reshoring trend that the administration is working to strengthen.
Despite President Biden having released a detailed budget for middle class economic growth over a month ago, House Republicans are on a congressional recess without having answered his call to release their own.
The only plan any segment of the House Republicans Conference has put forward is from the ultra MAGA House Freedom Caucus, which is newly empowered after deals made by Speaker McCarthy in January.
The House Freedom Caucus proposal explicitly targets the Inflation Reduction Act’s energy investments for repeal – investments The Wall Street Journal underlined and that have helped create over 100,000 high-quality American jobs.
They are joined by a large number of other House Republicans who want to eliminate the entire Inflation Reduction Act, killing not only those jobs but ending Medicare’s new ability to negotiate lower drug costs, all to cut taxes even more for wealthy special interests.
What’s more, the same House Republicans want to add trillions to the deficit, including by prolonging the wasteful Trump tax giveaways to the rich and big corporations – which harmed American manufacturing by creating new incentives to send jobs overseas.
President Biden has made bringing manufacturing jobs home to America a core goal of his plan to build an economy that works from the bottom up and the middle out.
But House Republicans are so dead-set on making the American economy work from the top-down that their only budget plan so far is to kill manufacturing jobs, many of them in red states, just because a Democratic administration is delivering them, and then give special tax payouts to multinational corporations that offshore even more jobs.
China couldn’t write House Republicans’ economic policies better themselves.
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Andrew Bates is the White House Deputy Press Secretary and Senior Communications Adviser.
