A little more than one year ago, U.S. Rep. Steny H. Hoyer launched an effort to boost domestic manufacturing in order to relieve high unemployment and keep the United States competitive with other global manufacturing giants.

Since then, he has made numerous public appearances touting the initiative and visited several local manufacturers to see how they do business and find out what the Make It in America agenda would mean for them.

The congressman’s ongoing tour brought him to a town hall meeting at Westlake High School on Monday evening, where more than 75 people, many of them union workers or public sector employees, gathered in the school’s auditorium to hear Hoyer and watch a 10-minute video on the initiative.

The documentary, which features federal officials, union leaders, manufacturing executives and small business owners, was recently released by Hoyer’s office and can be viewed online.

To watch the video, go to www.democraticwhip.gov/content/make-it-america-documentary.

Once the world’s undisputed manufacturing king, the United States still ranks at the top globally, but the gap between it and the runners-up has closed significantly.

In 1980, 18.7 million people worked in manufacturing, 21 percent of all U.S. jobs. By 2010, 11.5 million manufacturing jobs remained, 8.9 percent of the total.

In response, Hoyer spearheaded the Make It in America agenda, which focuses on revamping the nation’s infrastructure, improving education and encouraging innovation.

In addition to rebuilding roads, bridges, railroads and transit systems, the agenda focuses on establishing a national infrastructure bank and increasing investments in clean energy and education in science, technology, engineering and math. The initiative also aims to improve the nation’s patent system and provide tax credits, which encourage companies to research new products.

“We have to outbuild, out-educate and out-innovate our competitors,” Hoyer said, words used by President Barack Obama during his State of the Union address in January and at various times since.

Seven agenda bills have been signed into law, including one last month that alters the nation’s previous “first to invent” patent system to one that awards patents to those who first apply.

The other six bills, all passed last year, will make it cheaper for domestic companies to procure manufacturing materials, cut a backlog of 1.2 million pending patent applications, close tax loopholes, which encourage outsourcing of U.S. jobs, expand lending and provide tax incentives to small businesses, invest in STEM programs, establish loan guarantees for small- and medium-sized manufacturers and provide grants boosting training and employment in the energy sector.

But Hoyer admitted at the town hall that Make It in America was not a great short-term fix for the nation’s stagnant unemployment, which currently sits at 9.1 percent.

“Make It in America will not produce the kind of jobs we need in the short term,” he said. “It’s a strategy for the medium and long term.”

In order to address unemployment right away, Hoyer said Congress should pass Obama’s American Jobs Act, which includes tax cuts for small businesses, tax credits for companies that hire unemployed veterans, $50 billion to rebuild infrastructure and create a national infrastructure bank, $25 billion for renovations at 35,000 schools and $5 billion for community college upgrades.

Faced with stiff opposition in the GOP-controlled U.S. House of Representatives, Democratic lawmakers are trying to pass chunks of the legislation that have Republican support.

Hoyer also addressed federal regulations via an analogy sports fans could understand.

“If you take a referee off a football field, the game gets pretty ugly, and the chances are if there’s no referee on the field the little guy is going to get trampled by the big guys,” he said.

Congress, Hoyer said, “took the referee off the field” with respect to the financial industry, leading to a recession in which “a lot of little people got trampled.”

The congressman continued the analogy, also cautioning against overregulation.

“When you put the referee back on the field” he should be on the sideline to make sure “the wide receiver does not leave two seconds before the ball is out” and claim “an unfair advantage” on the competition, Hoyer said. “What you do not want to do, however, is put the referee in front of the wide receiver so the wide receiver can't run.”

After fielding a question from an audience member, Hoyer acknowledged that his support of 1999 financial deregulation legislation, which many have tied to the recession, which hit in 2008, “may well have been a mistake.”

Hoyer also used the unpopular Troubled Asset Relief Program of 2008 to draw a distinction between the current and previous Congresses.

When Democrats controlled Congress, they worked with then-President George W. Bush to pass TARP in an effort to avoid a global financial catastrophe, despite ardent opposition from congressional Republicans. When Obama became president, no Republican lawmakers voted for his $787 billion stimulus program, which Hoyer said created 2 million jobs.

jnewman@somdnews.com