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Raymond Richman - Jesse Richman - Howard Richman Richmans' Trade and Taxes Blog How to Encourage Manufacturing Innovation On December 5, 1791, President Washington’s Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton presented a Report on Manufactures to Congress which established America's tariff-based industrial policy for the next 150 years. He began by noting the general recognition of the importance of manufacturing to an economy:
And later in the report he noted the general recognition that the American people have a special aptitude for innovation:
In June 2011, President Obama’s President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) put together a Report to the President on Ensuring American Leadership in Advanced Manufacturing with a similar emphasis upon the importance of manufacturing and manufacturing innovation. PCAST is a prestigious group including top academic and business leaders, including Craig Mundie, Chief Research and Strategy Officer of Microsoft, and Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Google. Their report was based upon a workshop in which they heard testimony from leading manufacturers and innovation experts. The resulting report shows some good understanding of the problems of the U.S. manufacturing sector. It shows some good understanding of what has worked to encourage innovation in the past. But when it comes to economics, its recommendations are inadequate. The report points out that after manufacturing moves abroad, research and development follow, and soon, Americans have little chance to be innovative. It recommends that $500 million be spent to encourage innovation, modeled upon the SEMATECH consortium which saved the American integrated circuit industry. Here is a description from the report of what happened:
In his June 25 radio and Internet address, President Obama ran with this idea. He recommended that money be spent to create infrastructure that would promote innovation in advanced manufacturing. He said:
Obama was trying to strengthen his argument, in his negotiations with Congressional Republicans over the debt, that federal government spending should be maintained or even enhanced in order to achieve prosperity. Specifically, he argued:
But the report didn’t recommend an increase in federal spending in order to fund the public-private partnerships. It recommends that the funding be found by cutting elsewhere. I recommend that we take the funding from the excessive $2.5 billion spent by the federal government in 2011 to sponsor research on climate change. Not only does climate change funding show little economic benefit, but it may even be corrupting the scientific community, forcing scientists to give lip service to the outmoded man-made climate change models in order to maintain their funding. But the report didn't just deal with the scientific problem of how to encourage innovation, it also deals with the economic problem of how to insure that American manufacturing innovations would be produced in the United States and benefit the American economy. This is indeed a huge problem. In fact, the report notes that many of the innovations developed in the U.S. in the past are currently being produced abroad. This statement appears in Box 1 of the report:
The report notes that comparative advantages in manufacturing are obtained through learning by doing:
The report notes that the problem is compounded when R&D follows the factories abroad:
In order to keep these innovations in the United States, the report recommends that the marginal rate of the U.S. corporate income tax be reduced and that an already-existing R&D tax credit be reworded so that it specifically applies to manufacturing R&D:
The R&D tax credit sounds like a good idea. But why should the federal tax code be full of incentive-distorting tax credits? Lowering the income tax rate would create improved incentives without distortions. The American corporate income tax rate is much higher than the rate of just about every other country. When American businesses make investment decisions, they must subtract the future income tax payment from any calculation of the potential return of the investment. The higher the corporate income tax rate, the more it discourages investment. Furthermore, American corporations can avoid paying the American corporate income tax by locating their factories abroad without bringing their profits back to the United States. Every two years, when they are running for reelection, Democrats propose taxing American corporations on profits earned abroad. If they ever carried out that foolish recommendation, corporations would move their headquarters abroad to avoid the American corporate income tax altogether. We would not only lose factories, but corporate headquarters as well. The obvious solution is to lower the corporate income tax rate. The PCAST report recommends lowering it from the current 35% to about 25%, the level of most European countries and of Rep. Paul Ryan's House Budget Plan. But many countries have corporate income tax rates below that. For example, Ireland’s corporate income tax rate is just 12.5%. Former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty has recommended that the U.S. Corporate Income Tax rate be reduced to 15%. He thinks that lowering the corporate income tax that far would jumpstart American economic growth. During the 2008 presidential elections, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee went even further. He recommended reducing the corporate income tax to zero by substituting the FairTax (a sales tax) for the payroll taxes as well as both the personal and corporate income taxes. The FairTax is border adjustable, which means that it is paid on imports but excluded from exports, so it doesn't prevent domestic investment decisions. Another possibility would be to replace the corporate income tax with a value-added tax on goods (since goods are involved in international trade). Almost all of America’s trading partners already have a value-added tax of at least 15%. Like the FairTax, the value-added tax is border adjustable which means that it is paid on imports but excluded from exports and so doesn't prevent domestic investment. But even these reductions in the corporate income tax rate to zero would be inadequate because they would not stop our trading partners from practicing mercantilism in order to steal our industries. The more that we would innovate, the more they would steal. Currently, we practice free trade, while our trading partners practice mercantilism. Take Mexico for example. Despite NAFTA, Mexico, copying China, manipulates the dollar-peso exchange rate so that it runs trade surpluses with the United States, and we don’t object. Mexico even is using tariffs on American products to gain access to America’s internal trucking industry, and President Obama is capitulating to their demand. Or take South Korea. South Korea uses non-tariff barriers to keep out American products. It is no accident that we import about 700,000 cars each year from South Korea, while they only import about 6,000 from us. We are in the midst of ratifying a so-called “free trade” agreement with them which lets them continue to manipulate non-tariff barriers and the dollar-won exchange rate in order to continue running trade surpluses with us. As a result, this "free trade" agreement will likely cost us jobs. The worst case of all is China. UC-Irvine economist Peter Navarro, author of the new book Death by China, writes:
Until the U.S. requires that trade be balanced, any innovations produced in the United States will soon be manufactured abroad. Then R&D will follow the factories abroad. As a result, PCAST's encouragement of innovation would only provide the United States with temporary benefits. PCAST should hold a second workshop, this time with our country’s top trade economists. The report acknowledges that PCAST was in contact with Ralph Gomory, a top former-industrialist and innovator with IBM who is simultanously a top trade economist. But the report certainly did not include Gormory's recommedations on how to balance trade. The next workshop should also include top trade economists Peter Morici and Peter Navarro. If we were invited, we would explain our WTO-legal scaled tariff whose duty rate would be regularly adjusted with each individual country so as to take in half of the U.S. trade deficit with that country, forcing our trading partners to take down their barriers to American products. And the scaled tariff would not be a budget buster, quite the contrary. It would generate about $250 billion as federal government revenue in the first year. The public-private partnerships proposed by PCAST could be funded and still leave 499/500th of the new revenue generated to help balance the federal budget. For the 200 years after 1791, when Hamilton submitted his Report on Manufactures to Congress, America’s growing manufacturing base produced growing prosperity. Our manufacturing, even more than our armed forces, won both World War II and the Cold War. PCAST has done our country a service by bringing attention to our declining manufacturing sector which is resulting in our declining capacity for innovation. Unfortunately, their solution for jump-starting innovation wouldn't help much unless the United States simultaneously required balanced trade. Comment by vhhjbk jkih, 6/30/2011: Free Trade is great for China! Democracy is only Dellusion US is for the Rich and by the Rich Response to this comment by Howard Richman, 6/30/2011: Comment by Bruce Bishop, 6/30/2011: There is a fly in the ointment: Liberal/Progressives (socialists) hate manufacturing because it results in unequal distribution of wealth. Liberal elites in the media and in academia are particularly galled because they see people who are less educated than themselves, earning millions, while they struggle to get by on salaries in the low six figures. Also, it was the growth of U.S. manufacturing and the middle-class that thwarted the leftist dreams of a socialist utopia with the liberal elites in charge. Obama has no intention of reviving manufacturing, although he must pretend to be doing something about it. He has a history of appointing advisory commissions and then ignoring their recommendations. Should PCAST come up with anything promising, Obama will drag his feet and the mainstream media will cover his tracks until the folks forget about it. I was delighted to learn of your recommendations for "balanced trade," and agree that your proposal (or Mr. Buffett's) is reasonable and doable. Unfortunately, the Republicans in Congress are too weak to take up such a measure, and the liberal/progressive Democrats would never let it fly. Also, as important as saving manufacturing is, the bigger issue is getting federal spending under control. If we are to bring back manufacturing, we must first have a sound fiscal platform. Whether we will accomplish that in time to save the country is unknown. The primary goal of the Tea Party movement is to see to it that Republican candidates in 2012 are, as far as possible, fiscal conservatives. As I see it, our only hope for survival as a great nation is to elect a majority of fiscal conservatives to Congress. If we can accomplish that, then all things -- including the resurgence of manufacturing -- are possible. If we fail to accomplish that, then we are headed into the abyss. Response to this comment by Howard Richman, 6/30/2011:
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