Booker: ‘We Need to Bring Back American Manufacturing’ on Critical Supplies

On Friday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “All In,” Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) said the United States has “a national security problem” with vulnerabilities in its supply chain and stated that we need to bring the manufacturing of things “that are critical to our well-being, that are national security issues,” like swabs and penicillin back to America.

While discussing legislation to give a skills training credit to those who have been displaced by the coronavirus that he has proposed, Booker stated, “we, right now, have a national security problem with our supply chain vulnerabilities, the fact that we don’t make swabs in this country like we should, the fact that we have to rely on China for penicillin. If we had a crisis with them, we could be in real trouble. We need to bring back American manufacturing on things that are critical to our well-being, that are national security issues, and make sure that those manufacturing jobs, which are now, very high-skilled jobs, to be a machinist and others, they’re middle-class jobs that you earn a lot — a really good salary, but they need specialized training. We should really ramp up [those] kind of apprenticeship programs in our country.”

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