{"id":61190,"date":"2025-10-10T13:57:09","date_gmt":"2025-10-10T17:57:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/?p=61190"},"modified":"2025-10-10T13:57:09","modified_gmt":"2025-10-10T17:57:09","slug":"we-can-make-things-here-in-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/?p=61190","title":{"rendered":"We Can Make Things Here In America!"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Tuesday, Real Clear Politics<\/a> posted an commentary about manufacturing in America. The commentary relates the story of the Sharpie, now manufactured almost entirely in America.<\/p>\n

The commentary explains:<\/p>\n

President Donald Trump loves a Sharpie pen, and now he has all the more reason to love the company that makes them.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The president signed the flurry of executive orders he issued the day he returned to office with a Sharpie.<\/strong><\/p>\n

He’s used them for years, finding them more reliable than fancier pens.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Now we know they have another merit, too: They’re almost entirely made in America.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Newell was once as dazzled as other manufacturers by the prospect of making its products more cheaply in Asia.<\/strong><\/p>\n

But in 2018, CFO Chris Peterson looked into producing the latest Sharpie, a gel version, at the company’s factory in Maryville, Tennessee.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The commentary notes:<\/p>\n

Ford Motor Company famously discovered it could sell more cars by paying its workers well enough to afford the automobiles they were making.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Trump wants to make American manufacturing great again.<\/strong><\/p>\n

But tariffs, which can help, are not enough by themselves.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Sharpie case shows domestic investment is critical.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The commentary concludes:<\/p>\n

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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

We can bring manufacturing back to America.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[9522,10589,4663,18598],"class_list":["post-61190","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-manufacturing-in-america","tag-president-trump","tag-real-clear-politics","tag-sharpie"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61190","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=61190"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61190\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":61191,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61190\/revisions\/61191"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=61190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=61190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=61190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}