The Information Technology & Innovation Foundation is presenting a briefing today at 1 pm ET to a U.S. Senate Manufacturing Task Force.  The ITIF's presentation, a "Charter for Revitalizing American Manufacturing," combines the input of more than 20 different professionals from business and labor organizations, think tanks, non-profit organizations, and academic institutions.  Their goal was simply to find bipartisan agreement on a core set of policy actions that "must be undertaken to renew American manufacturing."

The presentation today in Room 428A of the Russell Senate Office Building will include the following panelists: Robert Atkinson, President, Information Technology and Innovation Foundation; Bob Baugh, Executive Director, AFL-CIO Industrial Union Council; and, Jerry Jasinowski, Former Director, National Association of Manufacturers (NAM).

In preparing to release their Charter, the ITIF explained the predicament facing America:

Manufacturing’s critical role in our country’s economic future is beyond dispute. But over the past decade, the United Sates suffered the deepest industrial decline in world history, with manufacturing job losses worse than during the Great Depression.  We need a strategy to revitalize American manufacturing.

ITIF hopes that their charter will provide a strategy for moving forward in revitalizing U.S. manufacturing.  They explain that manufacturing is indispensable to the health of the U.S. economy, for four key reasons:

1) Without a robust manufacturing sector, the U.S. will have great difficulty balancing its foreign trade;  2) Manufacturing is a key source of above-average-paying jobs;  3) Manufacturing, R&D, and innovation go hand-in-hand. In fact, manufacturing is the principal source of innovation and R&D activity in the U.S. economy, and;  4) Manufacturing is vital to U.S. national security and defense.

Their charter's summary premise is that the United States needs a coherent national manufacturing strategy that includes the following major goals:

• Expand the Administration’s goal from doubling exports to transforming the U.S. into a net exporter of manufactured goods again. 
• Make the U.S. the world’s best manufacturing environment, in part by ensuring that U.S. manufacturers have access to the world’s best technology, talent, and infrastructure. 
• Promote a set of policies that support the entire lifecycle of technology development—from R&D, invention, and innovation, to scale-up for efficient production and market development—to take place in the U.S., so U.S. establishments and workers can capture maximum value-added.

To read the specifics of the ITIF's Charter, including trade, tax, and procurement proposals, click here.