On Friday morning, President Joe Biden is heading for Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, for discussions on improving infrastructure and restoring American manufacturing. As if to underscore the importance of the topics, a bridge in the city collapsed just before 7 AM ET, leaving at least four vehicles sitting among the rubble. Images show a fifth vehicle poised on the brink of going over. Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey indicates that there are three known injuries and no deaths related to the collapse.

Press Secretary Jen Psaki says that President Biden is aware of the collapse and in contact with officials on the ground. According to the White House schedule, Biden is due to tour a location known as “the Mill 19 site” that was once part of a massive steel manufacturing plant. That site is now a tech hub, acting as a location for startups that focus on artificial  intelligence, automation, and robotics. 

Biden was expected to give a speech at the site focusing on the economy. The top line of that speech was expected to be about the 5.7% economic growth that was reported on Thursday—the fastest increase since 1984—and about the resilience of the overall economy during the pandemic thanks to the economic support measures Biden pushed through as part of the American Rescue Plan.

But odds are good that, at this moment, speechwriters are rushing to give the infrastructure bill more attention.

In remarks on the bill just two weeks ago, President Biden had this to say:

Those bridges, said Biden, were in all 50 states. It’s not clear at this moment if that 45,000 included the bridge that collapsed in Pittsburgh on Friday morning, but it is certainly a vivid illustration of the need for this bill.

In addition to talking about infrastructure, Biden is also expected to talk about the return of American manufacturing. Over the past year, the economy has added 367,000 manufacturing jobs. The White House has also pointed out some big new plant announcements—including a new General Motors electric vehicle plant in Michigan and a new Intel chip refractory being built in Ohio. Unlike many of the plants that Donald Trump liked to brag about, these look to be real plants, hiring real people.

Biden can also be expected to draw a line between the need to restore manufacturing to the U.S. and the supply chain issues that have been highly visible during the pandemic. The need for manufacturing never went away. It’s just that companies decided to ship the jobs offshore to save marginal amounts of money. The result was not just a loss of American jobs and cities left to deal with closed manufacturing sites, but an increasingly fragile economy where American companies were dependent on outsourced parts, outsourced assembly, and long distance shipping. The result has seen situations like thousands of American cars sitting in parking lots around plants, waiting for parts from overseas.

Infrastructure plans—which include not just bridges, but investments in ports and railways—are also a significant part of addressing the supply chain issue for the future, as well as a means of creating hundreds of thousands of jobs in the near term.

Friday, Jan 28, 2022 · 2:06:47 PM +00:00 · Mark Sumner

A tweet from 3 years ago …