President joe Biden there in shirt sleeves at a automobile manufacturing plant truck manufacturing plant in Allentown Pennsylvania uh playing the cheerleader in chief you might say for uh his infrastructure plan but also he wanted to emphasize one aspect of his of his economic policy that he’s talked about and that he strengthened today and that is his effort to get more products manufactured to rebuild amendment American manufacturing uh he has that in common with president trump who tried to do so essentially through through trade wars through blocking the importation of products manufactured elsewhere to try to protect american manufacturers and build things up that way there were fewer manufacturing jobs at the end of his presidency than there were at the beginning Biden is trying a different tack he wants essentially to toughen the standards for buy american laws and force them more strictly and invest 50 billion dollars in manufacturing things like computer chips in this country in particular.
what the president announced is that as far as the federal government is concerned the federal government’s uh is governed by a buy american law and that law requires that the product be substantially manufactured in america the president noted that over the years substantially manufactured had gone down to mean only 55 percent of the product had to be manufactured in america and that that was never really enforced or checked this has been a long time complaint by the manufacturing unions who are very close to the president so today the president announced that he’d be toughening enforcement and that the federal government requirement that products bought by the federal government needed to be bought in america uh and 55 percent of them needed to be substantially made in america he upped that to 75 percent and he hopes that that will hope help american manufacturing i want to bring in our white house correspondent mary alice parks.
BIDEN WANTS
who’s with us right now on this this is classic bidenism and i wonder Mary allice from a political perspective is the white house essentially looking at polls softening around Biden that as he gets you know saddled as every president does with with significant challenges uh the pandemic roaring back the economy up and down he’s trying to get out there and remind people you know what he does stand for especially those blue-collar voters voters so crucial in his coalition yeah this was essentially a campaign speech i think you’re exactly right this was very political classic Biden his standard talking points i think it’s very possible his team is aware they need to have him out there on the road more it’s also summer and we were sort of expecting this we know that the senate was trying to wrap this work on a bipartisan infrastructure deal but then democrats were going to try after that in the month of august to sell a democrat.
