How to Increase Industrial Output

To increase a country's industrial output, all it needs to do is build more factories, hire more employees and put the pedal to the metal. America did this during WWII. The industrial output of America's war machine carried its economy for a full decade after the war's end. Now, China, India, and even Europe are increasing industrial output while America marks time. Our industrial output needs to increase before our competitors disappear over the horizon, never to be seen again.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderately Challenging

1. Acknowledge that our failing industrial output is a problem, that it accounts for the bulk of our trade deficit, and that the trade deficit places America at risk.
2. Evaluate the economics of industrial output with regard to balance of trade issues. Convince others that a weakened dollar is not necessarily a bad thing.
3. Analyze America's history for those factors that offered its greatest economic and industrial advantage. Focus on the times where there was an exponential change in industrial output.
4. Use the Manhattan Project and the Apollo Project as templates for a plan to dramatically boost industrial output.
5. Select the world's energy crisis as a problem to be solved as aggressively as that of placing a man on the moon. Make the goal of a safe, ecologically friendly, renewable energy source a national project. Sell this project to the American public the way Kennedy sold putting a man on the moon.
6. Emphasize that this goal is not only a response to the threat of being energy dependent but also a means of generating innovative, new industries. Constantly site the industries spun off of the space race.
7. Integrate private equity as new technology is spun off from the "national imperative program." Make the new technology available on a selective basis, to American companies--as was done with both the Manhattan projects and the Apollo project.

Tips & Warnings

• The explanation of why a weak dollar is not bad involves a give and take. It weakens our capacity to purchase foreign goods, and it makes life miserable for American tourists traveling abroad. Conversely, it makes American goods more attractive both at home and abroad and is an impetus for Americans to vacation at home. That is hardly a disaster.
• The reason that the Manhattan and Apollo projects are the most appropriate templates is that they represented creation of entirely new industries. America cannot compete in well established industries because of labor costs.
• As new technology is developed, it is important that America not do all the research and development and allow the rest of the world a free ride. This will be more difficult with regard to an energy project than it was with an atomic bomb and space vehicles--these both readily themselves to secrecy. Nevertheless, America needs to aggressively protect intellectual output since in the future, this will be its greatest industry.