Should America Continue To Support Failing Industries?

Whether or not you dislike the political, cultural or ideological aspects of the United States of America, one thing that can be taken as fact is the country has done a massive amount in innovation for the world as a whole. Albeit, many times it was off the back of immigrants, or in the name of war, but still some of the world’s greatest contributes to the global society started in the United States. I am not going to go into detail about whether or not we will continue to be innovative, mostly because I went into it a bit in another article in the past, but I do want to talk about whether or not America should choose to support failing industries as it has in the recent past.

The United States is a bit of a contradiction when it comes to the policies they institute. On one hand, they have been relatively good with fostering new industries and giving them time to grow, which lead to the amount of tech and internet companies we have within our borders, but also continuously trying to save industries that are doomed to fail. The biggest that comes to mind in recent years is the General Motors bailout and the consequential tax breaks and subsidies for the American auto industry. Despite South Korea , China and Japan being able to produce cars with many times better quality at much less, the government continues to throw money into a sinking ship. Don’t get me wrong, in many ways the automobile industry in the US put American industrialization on the map, but as we move forward in time, I hold the opinion we must let industries that are doomed to fail, fail. (Quick note: Im not going to mention the financial crisis bank bailout because the industry in large is relatively profitable as long as they don’t over leverage themselves.)

In my opinion we should focus continuously on specialization that changes and grows over time. For example, while the auto industry was revolutionary and very profitable for us at one point in time, we should let it die and focus our resources elsewhere. At the same time while the growth and processing of corn products is profitable to us now, maybe in the future it won’t be and it will be time to abandon that. In general when it comes to agriculture in the United States, the industry is so ridiculously subsidized that it is almost hard to lose money. Most of the subsidies were put into action when we were supporting small farmers who might lose half their crops to bad weather, but with today’s GMOs and the entire agricultural industry being run by a few companies, the subsidies in the amounts that we provide are not needed.

The United States is constantly battling itself with creating the innovation for the future, but also wasting money on protecting the past, only to keep a small amount of jobs that will be gone in 20 years anyway. Subsidies for dying industries are not a long term solution, but rather just putting a band aid over the problem. If we instead took all that money we are providing in subsidies and used that as grant money for research and development, imagination is the limit for what we can achieve. The technology companies for the next generation could be focused in the United States, generation another massive wave of wealth that we saw during the dot com era boom. This could prove invaluable for our success as a country for the future, instead of our empire withering away.

While there are definitely drawbacks to my solution of abandoning subsidies for dying industries, mostly the loss of labor and slight unemployment rises, these are only short term. In the long term workers will educate or train themselves to do another job in the upcoming industries like they have had to do time and time again. We must not be afraid to take a leap of faith and bet on the investors and entrepreneurs that the American system pushes out. Our future lies with them, not with old men refusing change and desperately holding onto dying industries.

-Calaber24p