The Chips Act is already a boon to the U.S.

Semiconductors are the bread and butter of high technology. Made from incredibly thin silicon wafers, semiconductor chips carry electric charges to help power our phones, computers and cars. Without a steady supply of semiconductors, any advanced economy would come to a standstill.

Anything that valuable is crucial to a nation’s security. If a hostile nation obtained control over a large portion of chip factories, it could economically blackmail its foes, much as the Arab oil embargo in the mid-1970s wrought havoc on the global economy.

As with other crucial manufacturing capabilities, the United States has steadily outsourced semiconductor fabrication to plants in Asia over the past 30 years. Even though the semiconductor was invented in the United States, only about 11 percent of global production takes place here. Fully two-thirds occurs in South Korea, Taiwan and Japan — which are all threatened by China’s rise. Given that Communist China is trying to create its own semiconductor industry to dominate global production, it’s not hard to imagine a future in which Chinese power threatens our advanced economy.

That’s why the passage of the Chips bill was vital to our national security. It allocated $52 billion in government money to help semiconductor firms build plants in the United States, offsetting much of the cost disadvantage that had driven production away. Ten new chip foundries are already planned for the United States within the next three years, and many more will surely be announced in the coming months.

These plants won’t make the United States self-sufficient in semiconductors; our firms will still import many more chips for their use than can be produced domestically for the foreseeable future. But all good things start small. The first fracking well didn’t make global news, but within a few years, so many had been drilled that the United States had gone from a large oil importer to an exporting nation again. That makes the country more secure because it no longer must depend on imports for the crucial commodity from volatile regions such as the Middle East.

The climate provisions in the recently passed Inflation Reduction Act will do the same thing for battery production for the surging electric vehicle market. It offers car buyers tax credits of up to $7,500 per electric vehicle, but to get the most money from the credit, the batteries must be assembled in North America and critical minerals used in the process must come from here or a nation with which we have a free-trade pact. Almost all EV batteries currently come from China, and even those that don’t are substantially dependent upon materials found in China.

Jump-starting the EV battery industry in the United States will also help national security. One can argue whether the federal government should be pushing for carmakers to switch to EVs, but it makes no sense to make our vehicle fleet dependent upon our biggest adversary. Well-to-do consumers are increasingly buying EVs even without federal support. The industry leader, Tesla, now holds nearly 4 percent of the entire U.S. car market even though purchasers do not qualify for the current federal tax credit. If the car market is moving to EVs, we need to ensure that China can’t stop our auto industry by cutting off battery shipments.

The new EV tax credit could also lead to a big uptick in mining. Some of the materials used in the batteries will clearly come from other countries, but the United States has substantial, mostly untapped, reserves of lithium. It also has unused reserves of nickel, another metal used to make EV batteries. Increasing domestic production of these metals would produce plenty of high-paying jobs.

The boon to U.S. workers will be substantial even without large increases in mining. Jobs at LG Energy Solution’s new battery plant in Michigan are expected to average $65,000 a year, while jobs with Intel’s planned Ohio semiconductor plant will average $135,000 a year. Many of those will surely be taken by college-educated workers, but that will also have positive ripple effects for workers without college degrees in the surrounding communities.

The United States has been served well by its relatively free market, but there are times that other interests should prevail. The national security rationale behind the new subsidies for semiconductor and EV battery manufacturing meets that test, to workers’ benefit.