How America Dismantled Its Own Industrial Base, And How We Must Rebuild It

For half a century, the United States has been viciously robbed of its industrial capacity. Between 1979 and 2024, America lost nearly 7,000,000 manufacturing jobs, a decline of more than one‑third of its entire manufacturing workforce. The share of manufacturing in GDP fell from 25 percent to less than 10 percent. The manufacturing trade balance flipped from a $17 billion surplus in 1980 to a $1.2 trillion deficit in 2024. Sixty thousand factories closed. Hundreds of communities, from Youngstown, Ohio, to Flint, Michigan, to Gastonia, North Carolina, were hollowed out, their populations halved, their main streets shuttered, their youth deserted.

This analysis provides the definitive statistical and historical accounting of that catastrophe, a conclusive refutation of the counterarguments made by free trade apologists, and finally, the NNA's decisive action plan for America's reindustrialization.

SECTION I - The Great Unbuilding

Manufacturing employment in the United States peaked in 1979 at 19.5 million workers, representing 22 percent of total nonfarm employment at the time. From that peak, the downfall of American manufacturing came in a set of deliberate waves that gradually crushed the nation's industrial capacity. From 1979 to 1993, a gradual erosion set in, with employment falling to approximately 17.9 million by 1990. Then came the NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) era from 1994 to 2000, when the decline accelerated dramatically. The manufacturing trade deficit rose 158.5 percent. All 50 states lost manufacturing jobs, and ten states lost over 100,000 net jobs each, with manufacturing shouldering 65 percent of the surge in job losses. Between 1994 and 2000, the United States lost more than 3 million jobs and job opportunities, equal to 2.3 percent of the labor force. Nearly two out of every three jobs lost (1.9 million out of 3.0 million) were in manufacturing. Counties in the top quartile of NAFTA exposure suffered 5-8 log‑point employment declines by 2000 compared to less‑exposed counties. Specific subsectors saw their job loss rates accelerate dramatically compared to the pre‑NAFTA period. For example, transportation equipment lost jobs 497 percent faster, communications equipment 449 percent faster, paper 364 percent faster, fabricated metals 208 percent faster.

But the true catastrophe arrived with the China shock of 2001 to 2011. This was the Great Extermination, as employment fell from 17.3 million in January 2000 to 11.5 million in December 2009, a loss of 5.8 million jobs. Three‑fifths of those losses occurred before the 2008 financial crisis ever even began. After China entered the WTO (World Trade Organization) in 2001, 3.5 million jobs were quickly gone by 2007, with another 1.5 million lost by 2010. The "China shock" accounted for 59.3 percent of all American manufacturing job losses between 2001 and 2019. By 2011, it was responsible for the loss of 1 million manufacturing jobs and 2.4 million jobs overall. The hardest‑hit locales were concentrated in the South Atlantic and Deep South regions. Trade pressure from Chinese imports leveled out after 2011, and yet the hardest‑hit US areas still have not bounced back from the utter betrayal that their communities suffered.

The "recovery" from 2010 to 2024 has been a cruel joke. Employment bottomed at 11.5 million in 2009-2010. As of 2024, it has only recovered to approximately 12.8 million, a pathetically small increase compared to the nearly 6 million jobs lost. In 1950, manufacturing accounted for over 30 percent of all US jobs. At its peak in May 1953, manufacturing's share of total nonfarm employment reached 32 percent. In 2024, it accounts for just 8 percent. And between 2000 and 2010, approximately 60,000 factories were shuttered, a rate of closure that underlined just how systematic the pillaging of America's productive base truly was.

The cheerleaders of the neoliberal order have often noted that real manufacturing output has increased. This is as true as it is deceptive. Real output has grown from approximately $1.8 trillion in 1964 to $2.8-3.1 trillion in 2024. However, manufacturing's share of GDP has continuously collapsed because other sectors (finance, real estate, insurance, healthcare, and other services) have grown far faster. In 1960, manufacturing represented approximately 25 percent of GDP. By 1970, that figure had slipped to 23-24 percent. Today, it stands at just 9.4-10.25 percent. Goods production overall (across manufacturing, farming, mining, and energy) fell from 39 percent of GDP in the 1950s to 21 percent in 2024. Meanwhile, the share of the service sector rose from 47 percent in the 1950s to 71-79 percent today. Private services alone have increased from 25 percent in 1950 to 47 percent in 2024.

The global picture is even more alarming. The United States accounted for 28.5 percent of global manufacturing output in 1970. Today it accounts for approximately 16 percent. China surpassed the United States in 2011 and now holds roughly 31 percent (nearly twice America's share). The trade deficit has kept score of the costs of America's deindustrialization. A nation that no longer produces things, imports them, and the numbers tell the story of our dispossession quite clearly. In 1980, the United States enjoyed a manufacturing trade surplus of approximately $17 billion. By 1990, that had become a deficit of $77 billion. By 2000, the deficit had ballooned to approximately $300 billion. In 2008, just before the crash, it stood at $433 billion. In 2022, the deficit hit $1.31 trillion for total goods. In 2024, the trade deficit in goods stood at approximately $1.215 trillion, the fourth consecutive trade deficit above $1 trillion and a record high. The manufactured goods deficit alone crossed $1 trillion in 2021. In 2023, as part of the massive trade deficit of $733 billion in overall manufactured goods, the US ran a deficit of $218 billion in advanced technology goods. In 1970, imports made up 12.8 percent of what Americans bought. By 2024, that figure exceeded 22 percent. Total imports in 2024 reached approximately $4.1 trillion in goods and services, roughly 15 percent of GDP. The collapse of America's trade balance has been unwinding since 1995, with the trade deficit rising from $10 billion to $100 billion per month, a tenfold increase.

SECTION II - Instruments of Deindustrialization

The dismantling of American industry was not an act of divine intervention. It was, rather, a series of deliberate policy choices made by a bipartisan political class that sold itself to the interests of multinational capital over the interests of the American people. NAFTA was sold to the American people as the novel vehicle of job creation. Instead, it was the harbinger of America's industrial suicide. The job losses associated with the trade deficit increased six times more rapidly between 1994 and 2000 than between 1989 and 1994. Counties whose 1990 employment base was concentrated in industries vulnerable to Mexican import competition suffered large and persistent employment losses after NAFTA. But the grant of Permanent Normal Trade Relations to China and China's entry into the WTO was the single most destructive trade policy decision in American history. Between 1991 and 2007, the value of American imports from China increased 1,156 percent. China's share of US manufacturing imports rose from 5 percent in 1991 to 11 percent in 2001 to 23 percent in 2011. The 2001 US-Vietnam Bilateral Trade Agreement immediately reduced US tariffs on manufacturing imports from Vietnam from 31.9 percent to 2.9 percent on average. The result was that Vietnamese provinces more exposed to industries that benefited from US tariff cuts saw more new manufacturing jobs created between 2001 and 2003, in Vietnam. Those were American jobs, shoved to Vietnam by the dictates of Washington DC and their partners in Wall Street.

Since the Volcker era, the Federal Reserve has maintained a strong dollar policy. A strong dollar makes imports cheaper, benefiting consumers and Wall Street, and exports more expensive, punishing domestic producers. This policy effectively subsidizes foreign manufacturing at the expense of American manufacturing. It is a tax on every factory worker and a transfer to every importer. Between 2004 and 2014, S&P 500 companies spent 54 percent of earnings on stock buybacks and 37 percent on dividends, 91 percent of earnings returned to shareholders rather than reinvested in plant, equipment, R&D, or workers. This "shareholder value" doctrine, enforced by Wall Street, transformed American corporations from long‑term productive enterprises into short‑term extraction machines. If a CEO proposed building a new factory instead of boosting the quarterly dividend, that CEO was fired. The result was capital starvation for American industry.

In 1954, 34.8 percent of the American workforce was unionized. By 2024, private sector union density had fallen to 5.9 percent. The absolute number of union members fell from 21 million in 1979 to 14 million today. A 2024 Federal Reserve paper found that the decline in unionization rates explains more than 70 percent of the decline in the manufacturing wage premium since the 1990s. Without collective bargaining, workers had no power to resist wage suppression, benefit erosion, or offshoring. Organized labor was the first line of defense, and when it fell, the factory floor followed.

SECTION III - Deaths of Despair

But America's deindustrialization is not a mere set of statistics. It has been measured in broken bodies, broken families, broken communities, and early graves. Economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton have documented the rise of "deaths of despair" (suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholic liver disease) among middle‑aged white Americans without college degrees. They have successfully tied these deaths this directly to the disappearance of stable, high‑wage, low‑skill employment. When a man loses not just his job but his reason for getting up in the morning, he has nowhere else to go. A 2020 study published in JAMA Network Open tracked counties that experienced automotive plant closures, and found that five years after a closure, opioid overdose mortality increased by 8.6 deaths per 100,000 individuals, an 85 percent relative increase compared to unaffected counties. The closure of an auto plant did not merely cause unemployment. It killed American workers. NAFTA, the China shock, and the political class that enabled it all, have been behind everything from the collapse of American incomes to the rise of MAGA, from the dwindling marriage prospects of working‑class men to the opioid crisis, and even the tragic rising tide of deaths of despair. Hundreds of thousands of Americans have died, and somebody is to blame.

On September 19th, 1977, the Campbell Works of the Youngstown Sheet & Tube Company closed down. Ultimately, 50,000 Youngstown workers lost their jobs when the mills shut down in 1978. As a result of the loss of the town's industrial foundation, grocery stores, retailers, banks, and other businesses collapsed in sync. Droves of American families left. The city's population fell from 170,000 in 1970 to 60,000 today, a loss of nearly two‑thirds of the city. Youngstown became the symbol of the death of American industry.

The manufacturing workforce that remains is aging out. The median age of manufacturing workers in 2024 is 44.3 years, compared to 42.1 for all employed persons. Nearly a quarter of manufacturing workers are 55 or older, representing approximately four million individuals approaching retirement. Seven percent are 65 or older. Over 47 percent are between 45 and 65+. Nearly 75 percent of the manufacturing employment gap over the next decade will be due to retirements. Younger workers are put off by the industry. At the end of 2024, only about 8 percent of US workers held manufacturing jobs, down from over 30 percent in 1950. The economy is broken. Instead of making new steelworkers, we are watching the last of the old ones slowly die out, as the stars of old America’s industry flicker for the last time.

The manufacturing wage premium (the extra pay a manufacturing worker earned compared to a non‑manufacturing worker with similar characteristics) has completely reversed course. In the 1990s, manufacturing workers earned approximately 9 percent more than comparable non‑manufacturing workers. By 2024, non‑manufacturing workers earn almost 9 percent more than workers in manufacturing. It has become a punishment to work in manufacturing rather than a pride. Since 2006, manufacturing wages have averaged gains of 2.3 percent per year, while private sector wages have risen 2.6 percent per year. Because of that differential, the level of wages in the private economy caught up with manufacturing wages in April 2018 and has been higher ever since. This must change.

SECTION IV - The Global Toll

The deindustrialization of America did not happen in a vacuum. It was accompanied by the industrialization of China, a process enabled and accelerated by American trade policy. In 2011, China surpassed the United States in manufacturing value‑added. China is not simply a "competitor", but the direct beneficiary of American policy. The same bipartisan consensus that opened the borders to Chinese goods also encouraged American corporations to relocate production to China, accepted Chinese currency manipulation without any serious pushback, looked away from theft of American intellectual property, and failed to enforce labor and environmental standards in trade agreements. The result is a China that is economically ascendant and strategically confident. The China of today is a China that has built a military to challenge American dominance, a China that threatens Taiwan, a China that has now aligned with Russia against the West. Every dollar of the trade deficit with China is a dollar of American power transferred to Beijing. Declining U.S. manufacturing has sharply curtailed a key path to the middle class for those with high school educations or less, thereby exacerbating income inequality nationwide.

But what of the immigration crisis? The wave of mass migration that has beset the United States of America is not merely a humanitarian issue. It is an economic weapon that has been wielded by multinational corporations against the American people. Since the 1960s, mass migration has been used to flood the labor market with cheap, exploitable workers, driving down wages, undermining collective bargaining, and breaking the solidarity of the American working class. The Hart-Celler Act of 1965 resumed the mass migration that had been held in check since 1924. The Reagan amnesty of 1986 granted citizenship to nearly 3 million illegal aliens while promising "employer sanctions" that were never enforced. The H-1B visa program has been exploited to replace American tech workers with cheaper foreign labor from India. Guest-worker programs in agriculture and construction have been used to suppress wages and prevent the reemergence of organized labor. The result is a permanent underclass of low-wage labor that has undercut American wages, especially for Black and Hispanic workers who had only recently gained a foothold in the industrial economy. The position of the New Nationalists of America, as articulated in the Program, is simple and clear: a nation that cannot employ its own people has no business employing the people of other nations.

Among the most destructive forces that have descended upon American industry is the private equity firm. These institutions are locusts masquerading as investors. They do not build, create, or sustain. They devour, first acquiring productive American manufacturing companies, not to strengthen them, not to expand them, not to secure the jobs of their workers, but to strip them for parts, load them with crushing debt, extract exorbitant fees, and abandon the hollowed remains to bankruptcy. The business model is simple: buy a manufacturing plant, sell the real estate, lease it back at inflated rates, load the company with debt, cut retirement contributions, gut healthcare, reduce wages, and walk away with millions while the community is left with an empty factory. A private equity firm buys a steel plant with a century of history, liquidates the equipment, terminates the pensions, and erases a generation of skilled jobs overnight. It buys an automotive parts supplier and closes two plants in just over a year, putting hundreds of workers out of work. It buys a paper mill that has made notebooks for generations of schoolchildren and shuts it down in 60 days, leaving 850 employees without a paycheck.

SECTION V - Refuting the Apologists

The apologists of the neoliberal world order offer a series of arguments to justify the raping and pillaging of American industrial life, each one more dishonest than the last. Some say, "Productivity has risen! Real output has increased!" This is as true as it is irrelevant. Productivity gains have accrued entirely to capital, not labor. Output increased because remaining workers were worked harder with longer hours, fewer breaks, more intensity, not because more things were made by more people. The human beings who once earned a middle‑class living are gone. A factory that employs 500 workers producing the same output that once required 5,000 workers is not a success story for the 4,500 Americans who were fired. The share of manufacturing in real GDP is the same now as in 1960, but the share of nominal GDP has collapsed. The difference is simple: manufacturing has been outpaced by other sectors.

Others insist, "The service economy is the future! You can't turn back the clock!" But the service economy is a euphemism for low‑wage precarity. Baristas, delivery drivers, and temp workers do not buy homes, raise stable families, or build communities. A nation of waiters and programmers cannot defend itself. Moreover, services are dependent on manufactured goods: you cannot deliver a package without a truck, process a credit card without a computer, or perform surgery without a scalpel. Manufacturing is the foundation of all modern life, and the government has allowed that foundation to crumble. Forcing a return to the 1950s economic structure would entail reallocating labor from higher value-added sectors to those with comparatively lower productivity, but that misses the point: we are not advocating for a return to 1950; we are advocating for a restoration of productive capacity.

The old guard protests, that "tariffs and protectionism failed in the 1930s!" But the Smoot‑Hawley tariff was a blunt, retaliatory instrument applied after the Great Depression had already begun. It was not the cause of the Depression, and it is not the model for a modern industrial policy. We propose strategic, unilateral, conditional tariffs combined with industrial policy, public investment, labor protections, currency management, and domestic content requirements, the very mix that built the postwar American middle class. Modern Germany, Japan, South Korea, and China all used protectionist and state-interventionist policies to build their industries. Only the United States of America was foolish enough to abandon them.

The apologists declare, "China's rise was inevitable!" But China's rise was enabled by American policy. We gave them most‑favored‑nation status. We welcomed them into the World Trade Organization. We allowed currency manipulation. We looked away from their theft of American intellectual property. We encouraged our corporations to relocate there. Inevitability is the excuse of the coward. China's rise was not inevitable. It was facilitated by a bipartisan political class that directly profited from it.

And finally, the cruelest lie: "Workers should just retrain!" Retrain for what? The jobs that replaced manufacturing pay less, offer fewer benefits, and provide less stability. A fifty‑year‑old steelworker cannot become a computer programmer. And even if he could, why should he have to? We did not lose the ability to make steel. We lost the will. The capital, the machines, the technology, the natural resources, all still exist in America. What was lost was the political determination to use them.

SECTION VI - If We Do Nothing

If American deindustrialization continues unchecked, the consequences will be catastrophic. Economically, the trade deficit will continue to balloon, transferring American wealth to foreign creditors. The dollar will eventually lose its reserve status and trigger a currency crisis. The federal government will be unable to borrow at affordable rates, collapsing the social safety net that currently keeps much of America complacent with things as they are. Net exports have turned consistently negative since the late 1970s and bottomed out at -5.7 percent in 2006. Currently, net exports are about -3.0 percent of GDP. The growing federal deficit supports consumer spending, including on expensive services and increasingly imported goods, and the deficit is partially financed by foreign savings.

Socially, deaths of despair will continue to rise. Family formation will collapse further; the fertility rate will fall even further below replacement level, and America will become a nation of elderly, childless, and atomized individuals with no stake in the future. Politically, the resentment and anger generated by deindustrialization will continue to destabilize American politics. Extremism of both left and right will flourish in the vacuum left by the collapse of reason. Popular sovereignty itself will be at stake. Militarily, a nation that cannot produce its own steel, semiconductors, machine tools, and pharmaceuticals cannot defend itself. The United States is already dependent on foreign suppliers for critical military components. In a war with a near‑peer competitor, those supply chains will be cut, and America will lose.

SECTION VII: The National Development Plan

And yet, so many readers have already heard of these problems, these diagnoses, time and time again. Because they have lived them every day. The reality of deindustrialization is not an abstraction to the people of Youngstown or Flint. It is the story of their lives. But the New Nationalists of America does not mean to behave merely as yet another organization stating the obvious. We do not intend to merely catalogue America’s decline, but to reverse it. We prescribe a comprehensive agenda for the reconstruction of American industrial capacity, a National Development Plan that will restore productive power to the American people, rebuild the communities that neoliberalism abandoned, and secure a future worthy of the name "American."

The first line of defense is tariffs. We will impose immediate tariffs of 30-50 percent on all manufactured goods that can be produced domestically, phased in over two years to allow domestic capacity to ramp up. We will impose a 100 percent tariff on semiconductor chips imported from adversarial nations. We will impose 100-150 percent tariffs on foreign agricultural products that can be reasonably grown in the United States. We will impose export tariffs on raw resources (copper, coal, timber, rare earth minerals) until domestic industrial requirements are fully met. These protective tariffs will become the shield behind which American industry will finally be rebuilt. Tariffs alone are insufficient. They must be paired with mandates that ensure foreign goods are replaced by American production. We will impose a comprehensive domestic content requirement for all goods sold in the United States, phased in over five years and reaching 75 percent by 2035. We will impose a "Buy American" requirement for all federal procurement, with no waivers except for genuine national security necessities. The federal government is the largest purchaser in the world. It will purchase American goods. We will adapt the EU's Critical Raw Materials Act model for America, requiring that raw materials extracted from American soil be refined and manufactured into finished goods within our borders. We will no longer ship our natural wealth abroad so that foreign factories can sell us back finished goods at ten times the price.

We will revoke most-favored-nation status for China. The nation that has stolen America’s intellectual property, manipulated its currency, and flooded its markets with subsidized goods will no longer enjoy privileged access to the American market. We will negotiate bilateral, conditional, revocable trade agreements only with nations that meet labor, environmental, and human rights standards. Trade must become a partnership among nations that respect the dignity of labor and the sovereignty of their people, rather than a long race to the bottom.

We will provide zero‑collateral, low‑interest automatic loans to any American industrial or agricultural firm in good standing. The present banking system, controlled by private financial interests that have shipped America's jobs overseas, demands collateral that a working farmer or a struggling manufacturer simply does not possess. A family farm cannot pledge its land when that land is already mortgaged. A small factory cannot secure a loan when its only assets are the machines that run twenty-four hours a day. We will end this barrier to reconstructing American industry. We will provide equity infusions in exchange for a non‑controlling public stake for strategic sectors. The state will invest in productive enterprise and share in its success, drawing dividends that fund public goods without extracting a single penny from the wages of working people. We will establish a national industrial credit bank modeled on the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, with a mandate to direct credit to productive enterprise rather than speculation. The RFC rebuilt America during the Great Depression. A new RFC will rebuild America today. We recognize that small businesses make up 98 percent of all manufacturers in America. We will establish a national small manufacturer loan program with 90 percent federal guarantees, zero-collateral requirements for qualifying firms, and priority for businesses that reshore production from abroad. We will expand the SBA's "Made in America Loan Guarantee" and make it permanent, offering a 90 percent federal guarantee to help manufacturers expand facilities, hire workers, and increase production. We will establish a comprehensive R&D commercialization infrastructure to bridge the gap between laboratory innovation and factory-floor production. The United States lacks systematic mechanisms to push tens of thousands of enterprises to invest in productivity-enhancing innovations like robotics. We will provide subsidies, tax credits, government procurement, and other incentive policies to force small and medium-sized manufacturers to complete technological upgrades. We will expand the Manufacturing USA network of innovation institutes and create a federally funded Manufacturing Innovation Initiative that combines R&D investment with direct support for small and medium manufacturers to adopt new technologies.

We will transfer to public ownership all utilities (water, electricity, natural gas) as well as hydrocarbon extraction and refining, rail and energy transportation, and defense production. These sectors are the blood that fuels the American economy and the birthright of every American citizen. When a necessity cannot be lived without, it cannot be left to the greed of shareholders. We will aggressively reform permitting to fast-track power generation and transmission projects. Industrial electricity prices in Britain now run well above the median across International Energy Agency member countries, leaving domestic manufacturers at a clear disadvantage. A quarter of British manufacturers have either moved some operations overseas or were weighing up doing so because high energy costs at home were rendering them "uncompetitive." The United States faces similar threats. In the first quarter of 2026, PJM, America’s largest regional power market, saw wholesale electricity prices surge by 76 percent from Q1 2025. Rising electricity costs and increasingly scarce availability will erode industrial competitiveness, weaken supply chains, and put long-term economic and national security at risk. We will pause premature retirements of existing power plants. The transition to green energy must be managed, not rushed. We will not close power plants until new capacity is online and reliable. We will establish a national energy plan that prioritizes affordable, reliable industrial power. The United States will not depend on foreign energy sources. We will achieve total energy independence through a balanced portfolio of nuclear, hydroelectric, solar, wind, geothermal, and (where necessary) clean fossil fuels. A nation that cannot power itself cannot defend itself.

We will repeal all "right‑to‑work" laws. These laws are not about freedom, but freeloading. They allow workers to enjoy the benefits of union representation without paying for it, weakening unions and lowering wages for everyone. They will be abolished. We will establish sectoral bargaining for industry‑wide unions that set wages and conditions for entire sectors, not just individual firms. When every worker in an industry is covered by the same contract, there is no race to the bottom. There is only a floor beneath which no one can fall. We will mandate unionization in strategic industries including defense, energy, transportation, and critical supply chains. The safety and security of the nation depends upon the reliability of its workers. Reliable workers are secure workers. We will conditionally protect the right to strike, including secondary boycotts and solidarity actions. The strike is the ultimate weapon of the working class. It will be preserved. We will expand the Labor Court with binding authority over all workplace matters. The current system of employer-friendly arbitration has left millions of workers without meaningful recourse when their rights are violated. Wage theft claims can take years; a discrimination complaint can outlast the victim's employment; a safety violation may only be addressed after tragedy has already struck. The Labor Court will provide swift, fair, binding resolution. We will enforce a forty‑hour work week by law, with severe penalties for violation. The American worker has been told for decades that longer hours mean greater prosperity, and yet the fruits of those extra hours have flowed upward to the executive suite while the worker's family dinner grows colder and later. A forty-hour week would mean the restoration of a standard already won generations ago and since eroded through corporate plunder.

We will abolish all income taxes for individuals earning below $200,000. No American will ever again see a penny withheld from their paycheck by the federal government. The American people's labor should fund their infrastructure, with not a single dollar passing through the hands of a tax collector ever again. We will abolish the corporate income tax for domestic manufacturers. In recognition of the important service that productive enterprises provide to the government and people of America, they must be freed from the unfair tax burdens that have been levied upon them. Let a company that builds, manufactures, or harvests keep its earnings to reinvest in expansion, wages, and innovation. We will abolish property taxes for farmers and homeowners. No American farmer will lose the family plot to property taxes. No American homeowner will be taxed for the ground beneath their own feet. We will shift the tax burden to consumption, wealth, and financial transactions. And we will make tariff revenue the primary source of federal income, replacing lost income tax revenue. We will provide permanent full expensing of capital equipment for manufacturers, allowing U.S. corporations to fully deduct capital spending in the first year—a powerful financial incentive for companies to invest in production and distribution capabilities. We will impose no tax on overtime for manufacturing workers. The American worker deserves the full reward of his labor. We will provide a permanent 20 percent small business deduction. Small enterprise is the heart of Main Street. We will protect it. We will aggressively deregulate permitting that delays or prevents industrial expansion. The bureaucracy that has choked American industry will be cut back.

We will reinstate Glass‑Steagall, separating commercial and investment banking. The repeal of Glass-Steagall in 1999 paved the way for the reckless speculation that detonated the global economy in 2008. It will be restored. We will prohibit leveraged buyouts that saddle target companies with unsustainable debt. Private equity firms that acquire productive American companies will no longer be allowed to load them with debt and strip them for parts. We will impose personal liability for private equity partners for pension obligations, environmental cleanup, and unpaid wages when a portfolio company fails. The partners who walk away with millions while workers lose their pensions will be held accountable. We will impose a cap on stock buybacks at 10 percent of net income. The shareholder value revolution that redirected 91 percent of earnings from reinvestment to buybacks and dividends will be reversed. We will require that corporations reinvest at least 50 percent of profits in plant, equipment, R&D, or worker compensation. American corporations will once again be engines of production, not extraction.

We will provide free vocational training for all citizens in manufacturing trades. The nation that profits from an educated workforce must bear the cost of that education. We will establish a national apprenticeship system with industry‑recognized credentials, modeled on Germany's Dual Education System—where approximately half a million young Germans enter the workforce through apprenticeships each year. The United States manufacturing sector will have 1.9 million unfilled jobs by 2033, according to Deloitte and the Manufacturing Institute. Achieving the goal of eliminating the $1.1 trillion goods trade deficit would increase that workforce shortfall to approximately 7 million. The availability of skilled labor is the number one factor driving site selection for manufacturing in general and reshoring in particular. Germany's apprenticeship system has allowed that nation to avoid the skills shortage that has hobbled the United States for decades. Despite having wages close to the United States, Germany maintains a trade surplus of about 5 percent of its GDP, compared to a 3 percent trade deficit for the United States. We will expand the German Dual Education System—already successfully adapted in the United States through programs like ICATT and Apprenticeship 2000—nationally. We will reintroduce shop class in all public high schools. An American child who grows up to become a master plumber or a CNC machinist should never be treated as a failure, for he or she is the backbone of the American economy. We will provide interest‑free student loans for technical and engineering education. When tuition follows the student, and the student pays no interest, the institution must earn its keep through excellence, rather than through captive debt. We will establish a Civil Labor Corps to provide blanket employment in infrastructure rebuilding, with a path to permanent manufacturing jobs. No American who is able and willing to work shall ever be without a job. And no American who refuses to work when work is available shall receive the full benefits of the social wage.

We will implement a $2 trillion, decade‑long infrastructure program focused on roads, bridges, railways (passenger and freight), water systems, electrical grids, broadband, and public housing. These are not tragedies of nature, but rather are tragedies of neglect, and they represent millions of hours of productive labor still waiting to be done. We will prioritize American‑made steel, cement, and manufactured goods in all infrastructure projects. Every dollar of infrastructure spending will be a dollar of American economic activity. We will reopen old mines and establish new mines for domestic resource extraction. The lifeblood of American industry must come from America herself. We will direct investment to the communities most devastated by deindustrialization. The CHIPS and Science Act leverages direct financial incentives, R&D investment, and workforce development programs to boost the U.S. semiconductor industry. Central New York has become a key proving ground, as Micron Technology uses more than $10 billion in state and federal incentives to support a $100 billion investment in new semiconductor fabrication facilities. Nearly $80 billion in explicitly "place-based" industrial policy is now being tested in the nation's regions. We will build on these successes. We will direct investment to the communities left behind by globalization and automation, recognizing the place-based hardships of deindustrialization coupled with demographic decline. No community will be left behind. No town will be abandoned. No worker will be forgotten. We will bring all military production under public ownership, with additional requirements for domestic sourcing of all defense-related raw materials and components. The U.S. Department of Defense's recent Defense Industrial Strategy has outlined a path for the next five years—but that path must be accelerated and expanded. America is already dependent on foreign suppliers for critical military components. In a war with a near-peer competitor, those supply chains would be cut, and America would lose. We will ensure that all defense production is domestic and all defense-related supply chains are fully American.

SECTION VIII - Conclusion

The deindustrialization of the United States was not a freak accident of history. It was a deliberate, bipartisan policy project that was carried out over half a century by a political class that sold the American worker to the highest foreign bidder. The effects are visible everywhere the American people look. But the story does not have to end here. The same power of national action that built the postwar American middle class, that won World War II, that constructed the interstate highway system, that put man on the moon, can rebuild American industry. It requires only the political will to break with the neoliberal consensus and the courage to put the American people first.

The only question left now is whether or not America will choose to act now, or to fade into oblivion later.

President Theodore Roosevelt said at Osawatomie in 1910:

"The New Nationalism puts the national need before sectional or personal advantage. It is impatient of the utter confusion that results from local legislatures attempting to treat national issues as local issues. It is still more impatient of the impotence which springs from over division of governmental powers, the impotence which makes it possible for local selfishness or for legal cunning, hired by wealthy special interests, to bring national activities to a deadlock."

The national need today is the same as it was in 1910: To break the power of concentrated capital, to restore the dignity of American labor, and to rebuild a nation that belongs to its people.