The most impressive, perhaps only impressive, achievement of the Trump era is the growth in manufacturing jobs.
(based, in part, on an essay in Forbes) When President Obama came to office he inherited two crises. the immediate threat of a second Great Depression and the longer-term threat of a permanent loss of manufacturing jobs due to global export of unskilled labor. With reluctant cooperation from the GOP, Obama solved the immediate threat. From the depths of the Bush recession, employment expanding almost 12% from March 2010 until January 2017. Obama literally saved the US! But, manufacturing employment grew only 7.7% and manufacturing payrolls were virtually flat in the last 21 months of Obama’s tenure.
Why didn’t jobs at Ford, Maytag, and Acme Lighting Fixtures come back? Economists, as Obama stated in a speech, agreed that manufacturing jobs “are just not going to come back.” Detroit labor was just too expensive to compete with folks in Ghangzou. Paul Krugman tweeted on November 25, 2016, “Nothing policy can do will bring back those lost jobs. The service sector is the future of work; but nobody wants to hear it.” Unfortunately, thousands of Americans just don’t have the necessary skills required to work in numerous manufacturing plants, and those that do have the skills already have a job in the few plants the US has left. Many businesses decided to move their plants overseas to countries like China where quality and productivity are almost guaranteed. Additionally, after some research on sites like jonble.com, companies have found that they can use third-party companies to monitor their production and they can continue to work remotely, saving them an astonishing amount of capital. From a business perspective, outsourcing overseas is a great way to keep business booming.
Trump saw things differently. He promised to make steel and coal as chevvies and washing machines. He got elected based in that promise. So far that promise has been largely real. Under Trump nonfarm employment grew by a seasonally adjusted 2.6%. In the same period, manufacturing employment grew by 3.1%. Jobs in factories have been outpacing the service jobs! In addition production of goods from aerospace materials to stainless steel rectangle tubing seems to have increased. It’s probably too early to confirm, but it looks like US made goods are on the rise once again.
reserves at a rate faster than anything elsewhere in the world and our reserves are a small fraction of the reserves of the Saudis, the Iranians, Venezuela and Nigeria. None of these players are likely to support the US as global efforts (largely driven by China) create carbon-free energy or we run out of stuff we can find by “drill, baby drill.” Finally, the ultra low-interest rates and printing of currency used in 2008 to save the US from recession leave the Federal Reserve with only one resource, printing money, if we face another crisis. The problem here is the US dollar is not just our national currency. I have read that 90% of dollars are now held outside the US. If the Federal Reserve prints more money, the result could be a WORLD WIDE recession in an era where the Chinese are seeking allies to replace the dollar with the yuan as the international currency.