Proposed Bill Would Give Americans $5k to Shop American

  • This isn’t how to get more people to buy American. They should be proposing bills to pull the levers that make it logical for businesses to manufacture their products in the US again, then the market will take care of it. This is a long term solution. Throwing money at people is a lazy solution to try and avoid and political risk.

  • This would be less than good for inflation.

  • The last "buy American" campaign I remember (1990s?) was sponsored by Unions, IIRC. Be interesting to see if this works any better.

  • It seems like an interesting idea if there’s a way to make it not impossibly expensive to run, or too prone to fraud or both. Often there are these great sounding ideas that are impossible to implement. Our best laid plans go awry. Like NAFTA, and granting China most favored nation trade access. Seemed like great ideas at the time. Juiced the stock market no doubt. But now two or three financial crises later, the taxpayer is going to be paying incentives to try and bring some of that lost manufacturing back. Will it work? Same people who told us with confidence they knew what they were doing before are saying the same things now. “Just trust us, we know what we’re doing.”

    Perhaps these vacillations in core political beliefs (protectionism is bad under trump, suddenly good under Biden) should be taken as a sign of incompetence by observant educated voters.

  • Aka: Buying votes.