For America to sustain a high standard of living and set aside the resources needed for national security, at least a decade of shoring up productive capacity is required--a period of reindustrialization. The United States has been underdeveloping, with too much consumption of goods and resources and too little investment in the national economic machinery. Two opposite economic approaches have been advanced to remedy this situation: supply-side economics and industrial policy. Supply-side economists favor tax reduction, with the deficit made up by taxes paid by a growing economy spurred by the free market place and private investment of capital; while the advocates of an industrial policy propose a government-led economic development program, with government bureaucracy to determine winning industries, subsidize and promote them, while allowing losers to close, with government help to retrain and relocate their workers. Between supply-side economics and industrial policy is the concept of reindustrialization. The suggested cure for the economic malaise is semitargeted: release resources to the private sector, but channel them to the infrastructure and capital goods sectors--away from either public or private consumption, resulting in a stronger productive capacity. Vocational education belongs to the agenda of reindustrialization primarily because of its concern with the size, composition, and quality of human capital. At the present time, however, vocational education is not supplying workers with needed "employability skills." Before it can contribute to reindustrialization, vocational education must determine why those skills are not being developed. (KC)