Buy America builds more jobs at home

In 2008, the United States entered an economic downturn, the most severe since the Great Depression of the early twentieth century. Many, many jobs were lost, most families’ incomes fell and, with these occurrences, purchasing diminished, leading to a reduction in manufacturing and production. With this decrease, even more people lost jobs as factories cut back responding to a decline in orders. This vicious cycle has made the poor economic climate more pernicious and more difficult to overcome.

The reality of this situation is that, not only are many Americans unemployed, but finding a job, even after retraining, has become increasingly difficult. The length of time of unemployment has amplified significantly, with all the negatives that accompany that situation. Families find themselves unable to maintain their lifestyle or pay their bills and sometimes even unable to maintain their homes. During the present economic situation, over 5.5 million manufacturing jobs have been lost with over 54,000 manufacturing facilities shuttered.

As a society, we are focused on addressing this situation and attempting to resolve not only these perilous economic times, but to try to strengthen our economy to ensure this does not happen again. While some specific disagreement exists about how to address this pernicious situation, politicians and economists agree that creating and maintaining jobs is an essential ingredient. Employed Americans can take care of their families, pay their bills and pay their fair share toward necessary government services.

Moreover, in this global economy, we want to try to ensure that America is the most robust partner. We want to be the go-to country and not the exporter of jobs and the importer of goods. Our trade deficit with China has been rising and millions of jobs, not goods, have been exported overseas. Reversing this trend and ensuring American economic strength in the world is vital for our future.

The Buy American Act that I introduced this year in the legislature will help accomplish all these goals. This bill requires that the iron, steel and manufactured goods used in public construction projects, that is, the building, altering or repair of any public building or public works project be manufactured in America. The bill includes an exception if the iron or steel is not available or if the costs of these goods are prohibitive. In other words, all this proposed legislation says is that, when reasonable and available, the Commonwealth should buy American. This simple and patriotic directive can help address the present economic situation and help avoid its reoccurrence.

Infrastructure spending increases jobs. Each 1 billion dollars spent on infrastructure creates 18,000 to 35,000 jobs (dependent on the specific type of infrastructure projects). When this infrastructure spending includes Buy America provisions, which means that the materials for the infrastructure project must be manufactured in the United States, manufacturing jobs increase an additional 33% over the 18 to 35,000 jobs per billion dollars spent. A recent Duke University study confirmed the effectiveness of Buy America programs, stating, “Domestic content requirements have helped develop a robust U.S. component supply chain and give vital opportunities to U.S. firms.”

Moreover, this kind of legislation has an extremely broad base of support nationally. Over 91% of Americans support a mandated Buy America program including 90% of Republicans, 94% of Democrats and 89% of those who self-identify as Tea Partiers. Not only do Americans want American goods used, but, unsurprisingly, as a nation, an extremely high percentage, 97%, have a favorable opinion of American products. Americans know that the iron and steel produced here will be of the best quality, able to withstand years of use and not faultily produced with unseen, but potentially dangerous, flaws.

Buy American legislation has a lengthy bipartisan history. In 1933, almost a century ago, the first federal Buy American Act was passed to ensure that tax dollars were spent in America and to create jobs here. In the 1940’s, during the World War, the Buy American policies were extended to the defense industry. President Reagan signed an expansion of Buy America for federally funded highway and transit projects during his tenure in the 1980s. However, without state laws in place, opportunities are missed to increase American manufacturing and purchase. This diminishes the job producing power of Buy American. The legislation attempts to remedy that for Virginia.

Buy American is just common sense. We need to be building our own economy, not supporting and supplementing that of another country. We need to be creating and maintaining American jobs. As we debate regulation and taxes, government economic policies and the efficacy of Keynesian philosophy, near universal agreement exists on the absolute importance of keeping jobs and manufacturing in the United States. This legislation provides a simple and popular mechanism to do just that. Americans and Virginians will see the benefit in the quality of the infrastructure projects made with American manufactured goods and the jobs created to produce those goods.