1. So, you admit that total manufacturing jobs can "pick up". Thank you. That is very reasonable of you. Such a result would result is millions of better jobs for millions of American families with good secondary effects rippling though society greatly.
2. How do you conclude that "gone jobs" won't be the ones coming back?
A few may come back, but most are gone for good for multiple reasons. First, the market adjusts prices to reflect government policy. Trump wants to slap on a 20% tariff on goods from Mexico because he wants to raise the cost of production in Mexico. Since Trump was elected, the Mexican peso has fallen 10%, meaning the cost of production in Mexico has already fallen 10%. If Trump gets his wish, the peso will fall even further, and the tariff will wind up not having much of an effect. All that will happen is that the government will get more tax money and the consumers will have less. A tariff is merely a tax on consumption.
Second, even in areas where there has been investment in manufacturing, it has been in high-end manufacturing, often with few or no jobs. That's technology displacing labor. Those are never coming back. I was on a tree farm last year, watching trees being cut down and hauled out. I don't think there were 10 people on the site. 30 years ago, 200 people would have been working. Those jobs are never coming back. Manufacturing is no different.
But that's not a surprise. In 1900, nearly half of all jobs in the US were in agriculture. Today, it's 3%. But we produce 50x more agricultural products than we did back then. That's because of technology. We're transitioning away from a manufacturing economy like we did an agricultural economy for the same reason. It sucked if your livelihood was dependent upon being a farmhand, but it's hard to argue that cheaper, more abundant food was a bad thing for America.
If Trump goes ahead and strips away many regulations - which I fully support - we could see a surge in job creation, and that would include some manufacturing jobs. But most jobs will be created in the services economy.
The ironic thing is that if Trump's deregulation leads to an acceleration in the economy, it will likely mean a surge in inflation, interest rates, and the dollar, making American manufacturing even more uncompetitive. Wages were already beginning to accelerate. Trump's policies will likely fuel that.
