The impact of COVID-19 on this country didn’t need to be this bad. It shouldn’t have been this bad. But this is what happens when a country turns its back on manufacturing. America traded its independence for short-term corporate profits, and recovery is going to take much more than a few trillion dollars in federal emergency loans. A euthanized industrial base can’t magically be brought back to life.

Our government could do a lot more to level the playing field for manufacturing. While the Reshoring Initiative does not support individual candidates, we do recommend policies that will bring manufacturing back from offshore, and we try to document candidate positions on these issues.

It is too little and too late to keep writing “manufacturing matters.” Everything else in the economy is secondary to manufacturing, mining and farming. Only these activities build wealth.

WASHINGTON—The Obama administration has named 12 regions of the U,S. that will receive special attention under a new federal program designed to help make them more attractive to manufacturing companies.

PERRYVILLE, MO—Could the answer to America’s manufacturing problem be somewhere in this modest Midwestern town, population 8,225?

WASHINGTON—Manufacturing accounts for 28.7 percent of Oregon’s gross state product, the highest percentage in the country, according to the latest statistics from the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis.

Looking back on the campaign, it was refreshing to hear candidates from both parties tout the importance of U.S. manufacturing.

HARRISBURG, PA—State-level manufacturing job growth has varied across the 16 presidential administrations since 1948, with significant gains in most states across the seven Democratic terms and significant losses under the nine Republican ones, according to a new analysis of official government data.