Urges Plan to be Paid for with Charge on Glut of Foreign Capital Inflows
WASHINGTON — The Coalition for a Prosperous America (CPA) today applauded the goals of the American Jobs Plan, the Biden administration’s new infrastructure investment plan. The plan aims to “create millions of good jobs, rebuild our country’s infrastructure, and position the United States to out-compete China.” As the nation’s only national, bipartisan organization representing exclusively domestic producers across many sectors of the U.S. economy, CPA strongly supports investing in U.S. infrastructure, including the use of domestic materials and American companies that employ U.S. workers.
“For decades, Washington has watched as U.S. industrial capacity and millions of good-paying jobs have been offshored to countries like China,” CPA Chair Zach Mottl said. “The Biden administration is absolutely right that we need to ‘strengthen manufacturing supply chains for critical goods,’ as well as make a historic investment in our nation’s infrastructure. Congress and the Biden administration should ensure any infrastructure package signed into law uses American companies and American workers while rebuilding critical industries such as semiconductor manufacturing.”
To pay for this historic investment, CPA recommends the Biden administration and Congress include a 5 percent charge on the glut of incoming foreign capital to eliminate dollar exchange rate misalignment, an approach The New York Times reported on this month. A CPA study found that this Market Access Charge (MAC) of 5 percent would raise $3 trillion in federal revenue and lower the dollar’s exchange rate by 27 percent. It would gradually eliminate the U.S. trade deficit, greatly increase the economic growth rate and create up to 4.6 million jobs, especially in manufacturing. In 2019, Senators Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) and Josh Hawley (R-MO) introduced bipartisan legislation that would put in place this small charge on foreign purchases of U.S. stocks, bonds and other assets and address the over-financialization of our economy.
“CPA and our members welcome the goals of the American Jobs Plan. Congress and the Biden administration should seize this opportunity to rebuild a broad array of American industrial supply chains,” said Michael Stumo, CEO of the CPA. “This plan can be fully paid for by a Market Access Charge on foreign capital flows into the U.S., a long-overdue economic management tool that will create millions of good paying manufacturing jobs and eliminate the U.S. trade deficit. For far too long, the dollar has been weaponized against us by a flood of foreign investor purchases of Wall Street’s paper assets which, year after year, drives up the dollar to levels which make all USA-made goods, services, and labor less globally competitive.”
Earlier this month, CPA and China Tech Threat today jointly released a white paper titled “Maintaining U.S. Leadership in Semiconductors and Countering China’s Threats.” The paper examines the decline in U.S. market share in global semiconductor manufacturing, the attendant risks to U.S economic and national security, and why maintaining U.S. leadership in the semiconductor industry is critical for America’s industrial self-sufficiency.
Media Contact:
Nick Iacovella, Communications Director
nick@prosperousamerica.org
(202) 688-5145 ext. 0
