Young-at-Large
by JOHN YOUNG
Nerds are a candy that looks like a mistake. But the product is no miscalculation. Sold a teaspoon’s worth at a time, Nerds are making the Nestle Co. a lot of money. And – something we assumed mega-corporations aren’t doing anymore – Nestle is employing Americans to make them, at its factory in Itasca, Ill.
This Halloween, when a knee-high masked stranger walks away from the house shaking a box up to his or her ear to affirm its Nerd-iness, know that U.S. handiwork is behind the transaction.
Nerds are made under the Wonka name, which is under the Nestle name, which now is under the Swiss banner. But the majority of Nestle’s cavity-causing products are made in the United States. God bless America.
If you thought nothing gets made in the U.S.A. anymore, check the candy.
On the other hand, if you want to know what keeps China’s economy chugging, check non-edible items in the aisle stocked for Halloween – from wolfman masks, to plastic rats, to bloody skulls, to bloody anything. Made in China.
This is essentially what’s wrong with the economy – that a staple so central to America’s lifestyle, the doodad, is made overseas.
Some will assert that we can’t make plastic rodents and bleeding body parts in the United States because it’s not cost-effective, that Chinese factories make cheap stuff more cheaply. If that’s so, why does it not apply to confections? What, engineering and labor-wise, is the difference between chocolate/gummy/sugar morsels and plastic ones?
In an engineering sense, nothing that a candy company does is fundamentally different than what a company does that produces plastic eyeballs. So, why isn’t the United States competing in the eyeball market?
Michelle Obama reportedly was shopping in Target the other day. She would have done the nation a service had she gone home complaining that everything from ghoul fingernails to daggers through the forehead was made elsewhere, and why is that?
Were she to press her case, we would be a lot closer to the federal agency I’ve long proposed: the Department of Doodads, Thingamabobs, Gizmos, and Gimcracks – DDTGG. It would have a director dedicated to seeing how this country could compete in said arena. Let’s call its director a czar, just so a tea party blowhard can turn purple. It’s so easy.
I came to believe in the need for a federal presence in the thingamabob sector a long time ago when up to a quarter of my disposable income was going to variations of the Happy Meal. The concept was cunning: Worthless fried foodstuffs were but a pretext to a child’s having whatever plastic doodad was being marketed as the latest movie-theme rip-off. Say: Collect all 101 Dalmatians. By name.
I couldn’t believe that each of these items was being made in Taiwan, when the market was so fertile for American industrialists to make a buck therewith. In my naiveté, what I didn’t realize was that American industrialists were making money off these doodads. They just weren’t employing Americans, except those in odd hats behind counters.
Seriously, it is absurd to American manufacturers to punt away something so fundamental to the way Americans spend.
Bill Clinton had religion on the issue of ways by which government could cultivate progress in the manufacturing sector. His work helped the United States reclaim the lead in making semiconductors, a $144 billion industry.
Barack Obama truly has put a space-shot jolt into green industry. That economic stimulus measure that free-market (do-nothing) forces have panned as feckless, Time magazine has described as “changing America” through the development of wind and solar, fuel cells, energy conservation (retrofitting three of four federal buildings) and making the electric grid more dynamic.
Going green is great, Mr. President. Going green is the best thing we can do to wean ourselves of our carbon addiction, creating jobs in the process. At the same time, do not discount the importance of our addiction to plastic thingamajigs. I’ve pumped more money into Asia’s economy than I care to imagine. And all I got was black fingernails I can wear once a year.
Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado.
