Today, January 25, 2021, marks the first inaugural Buy American Day and while every day at Cultivate is Buy American Day, we could not be happier for our manufacturers and small businesses who stand to gain from the national push.

The US government will lead the effort with a $400 billion procurement investment to buy American-made. Additionally, they’ve announced a $300 billion investment in R&D and technology to advance our efforts in areas most necessary to advance our manufacturing efforts, including AI, 5G, electric vehicles, and lightweight materials. The impact of this initiative is far greater than its sum, with a “local multiplier effect”: each $1 spent locally is worth $1.50 to our economy.

In our previous posts, we’ve discussed the impacts of stimulus bills and how much of the stimulus money ends up being flushed into products and businesses abroad, through the likes of Amazon and other marketplaces. So, while the stimulus helps us as consumers in the short run, it doesn’t necessarily help our small businesses or manufacturers domestically, nor does it trickle down to the amount that comes back to us consumers through wages and salaries from those domestic businesses and manufacturers.

In order for the stimulus to circulate through our economy successfully, we, as consumers, have to make an effort to shop directly with small businesses that are selling US manufactured products. Every time we spend a dollar at a small local business, it generates at least 50% more economic activity for our economy than spending that dollar on a marketplace where the seller is based abroad, selling foreign manufactured goods. As a hypothetical, if you’re buying a product on Amazon and the seller of that product is from a foreign country with a foreign manufactured good, then 75 cents of your hard earned dollar is adding zero value to the US economy. If that seller, however, was based in the US and selling a locally manufactured product, your hard earned dollar would add $1.50 in economic value.

The “Shop Local” narrative has been buzzing around for quite some time now, but what does it mean in a world where Americans are consuming more and more digitally (amplified in the last year by the Covid-19 pandemic)? Even if you cannot physically shop local at the moment, you can still support US manufacturers by taking the extra step of learning where the products you buy digitally are coming from and if there are verified American-made alternatives you can buy instead. At Cultivate, our goal is to make this discovery easier and soon you’ll be able to shop closer and closer to your location.

In short, we’re elated that the government is taking charge and designating today as Buy American Day. At a time when businesses are shuttering across the 50 states, this effort should revitalize many of them and create opportunities for more to open.

And while time will tell if the government will follow through with their decrees, we at Cultivate will continue doing the research for you and connecting you with over 250,000 American-made products across the internet to help American manufacturing.