WASHINGTON — Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said Wednesday that the U.S. is considering collaborating with India on certain manufacturing jobs to be able to boost competition against China.
Raimondo told Jim Cramer on CNBC’s “Mad Money” that she’s going to visit India in March with a handful of U.S. CEOs to debate an alliance between the 2 nations on manufacturing semiconductor chips. The Commerce Secretary also revisited a few of President Joe Biden’s comments on American manufacturing from his State of the Union address on Tuesday.
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“We stopped making things,” Raimondo said. “I believe, in 1990, there have been like 350,000 people working within the chip industry in America. Now it’s like 160,000.”
Biden’s CHIPS and Science Act, signed into law in August, supplied $52 billion for U.S. firms to speculate in chip manufacturing. The U.S. semiconductor industry employed greater than 277,000 employees in 2021, in response to the Semiconductor Industry Association, but it surely made 0% of the world’s supply of semiconductors as of September 2022.
Compared, Taiwan and South Korea comprise 80% of the worldwide foundry marketplace for chips. TSMC, the world’s most advanced chipmaker, can be headquartered in Taiwan. But a collaborative effort between the U.S. and the Indo-Pacific “quad” region could lessen the worldwide reliance on Taiwanese semiconductors. In September 2021, India, Japan and Australia announced plans to ascertain a semiconductor supply chain initiative to secure access to semiconductors and their components.
Raimondo said that India is “making loads of the precise moves.”
“It is a large population. (A) lot of employees, expert employees, English speakers, a democratic country rule of law,” she said.
However the Commerce Secretary said the southeast Asian nation must comply with labor standards as a part of any deal, especially in light of India’s consumption of Russian oil. The G-7 countries, Australia and the European Union have issued price caps on the associated fee of Russian oil products to limit the Kremlin’s access to a possible funding source for its war on Ukraine while still maintaining an oil supply on the worldwide market.
“I’m running the Indo-Pacific economic framework,” Raimondo said. “So we’ve got 13 countries including India. And we’re saying to them, look, join on the government-to-government level to labor standards, environmental standards, anti-corruption standards, rule of law standards. And in return, it’ll unlock U.S. business, U.S. capital jobs in India.”
Raimondo also said she supports reinvesting the cash from Biden’s 1% excise tax on stock buybacks for giant businesses into the economy. Buybacks appeal to among the nation’s largest investors and corporations.
“I’m strongly with the President that we ought to boost taxes on the wealthiest and on corporations close some loopholes and take that cash and make investments,” she said. “You would like women to return to work? Childcare (has to) be provided, it’s too expensive. So, we want to boost taxes in some ways after which make investments to make the economy stronger.”
