It is difficult to find any similarities between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris in this heated electoral race. But there is one area in which there is a surprising amount of agreement: the need for the federal government to play an active role in encouraging investment in U.S. manufacturing.
This bipartisan consensus reflects a growing trend among economists and experts, who are now revising the unfettered free-trade and laissez-faire attitudes that defined U.S. economic policymaking for decades. As President Joe Biden’s National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and co-author Jennifer Harris noted in a recent op-ed, “advocating for industrial policy—broadly speaking, government actions aimed at reshaping the economy—was once considered embarrassing; now it (is) considered something close to obvious.”
