On Tuesday, Real Clear Politics posted an commentary about manufacturing in America. The commentary relates the story of the Sharpie, now manufactured almost entirely in America.
The commentary explains:
President Donald Trump loves a Sharpie pen, and now he has all the more reason to love the company that makes them.
The president signed the flurry of executive orders he issued the day he returned to office with a Sharpie.
He’s used them for years, finding them more reliable than fancier pens.
Now we know they have another merit, too: They’re almost entirely made in America.
Only the felt tip of a Sharpie comes from abroad — it’s made in Japan, according to the Wall Street Journal’s Natasha Khan, who published an eye-opening article on the penmaker last week.
What makes Newell Brands, the corporation behind the Sharpie, so newsworthy is its success saving money — and holding down consumer prices — by making the pens in America.
Newell was once as dazzled as other manufacturers by the prospect of making its products more cheaply in Asia.
But in 2018, CFO Chris Peterson looked into producing the latest Sharpie, a gel version, at the company’s factory in Maryville, Tennessee.
The commentary notes:
Ford Motor Company famously discovered it could sell more cars by paying its workers well enough to afford the automobiles they were making.
Long before globalization, America’s national economy boomed thanks to a virtuous cycle of rising wages, more technological investment, an increasingly educated workforce, and higher consumer spending on American-made goods.
Success at home led to success abroad: America was an exporting superpower that “ran persistent trade surpluses” from 1870 to 1970, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis relates.
Trump wants to make American manufacturing great again.
But tariffs, which can help, are not enough by themselves.
The Sharpie case shows domestic investment is critical.
The commentary concludes:
For most American manufacturers, private investment is enough — though even then, government must consider what unfair practices other countries may adopt to lure investment away from our shores.
There’s also a role for government in ensuring a reasonably level playing field at home, so investment isn’t incentivized out of manufacturing and into other sectors without the heavy upfront costs of plants and machinery.
Yet the Newell Brands example shows business leaders themselves can work miracles and defy globalization’s laws of gravity when they put capital behind America’s factories and workers.
We can bring manufacturing back to America.