One of the key issues that the Congress and the White House absolutely must address before a possible 2012 ouster is America’s manufacturing and industrial downfall.

The U.S. has not had a coordinated national industrial policy in decades, and each new Congress simply puts the issue on the back burner. They look only at the good and ignore the bad. For example, America is the world’s largest economy, it is one of the largest exporters, and its citizens are able to consume one-quarter of all the resources used on this planet in any given day.

Unfortunately there are some trade offs. Americans have no personal savings and monstrous amounts of personal debt, the economy imports 70 percent of its consumables from overseas, and the nation hasn’t created a single net new job in more than 10 years.

According to Industry Week, if the U.S. hopes to remain competitive domestically and internationally it has to address its manufacturing concerns.

Economist Gregory Tassey of the National Institute for Standards and Technology believes that this nation must immediately encourage research and development across its industrial infrastructure. Instead of seeing individual industries as bodies unto themselves, we need to show them as cogs in a greater American economic machine. When we allow one part to fall apart, or be outsourced, it harms the efficacy of the entire unit.

Tassey’s assessment shows that the U.S. must begin investing in R&D, as well as comprehensive growth infrastructure, if it hopes to stay in the game. Nations like China and India are content right now to continue providing low cost labor to build from other’s designs. But soon, those nations will do their own designing. After outsourcing our industrial jobs to low cost markets, we will eventually be muscled out of those markets by domestic firms who can provide the same services that we do.

When this time comes, and it will come, the U.S. will be left with nothing to fall back on if it stubbornly continues ignoring its industrial weaknesses.

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