The Folly In Trump's Manufacturing Promise

Then candidate Trump spent a great deal of time focusing on the Rust Belt, and much of his message involved bringing back the jobs which have left over the last number of decades. Trump focused on killing the Trans-Pacific Partnership, renegotiating or killing NAFTA, and his supposed ability to bully companies into bringing jobs back to the USA (or, even, keeping them here).

I've written about this already (click here if you missed it), and this conversation comes up often when discussing now President Trump, his promises, and what his supporters hope he will deliver on. Trump knows this; that's why he trumpets things like Carrier and Ford keeping jobs here, even as he glosses over how terrible the Carrier deal is for Indiana's citizens, or how Ford made the decision based on the market for small cars, rather than anything related to Trump.

The reality is this: people in the Rust Belt fantasize about returning to a time when the USA was the dominant manufacturing power in the world. Makes sense, right? These people have heard of (or, in some cases, even lived in) a time when the money was good, the benefits were insanely good, and the unions were so powerful that their bosses couldn't mess with them. What these people fail to realize is two things. First, the economic conditions that made that possible were almost entirely because of World War II, and the fact that the USA came out as the most unscathed world power, by far. Those conditions are not in existence anymore, making their fantasy impossible to make reality. Anyone telling them otherwise (including our President) is simply selling fool's gold.

The second point is even more important: if we bring all these jobs back, which will necessitate cutting taxes on these companies to the point where they aren't paying anything, it is simply temporary anyways. The fast majority of these jobs will be automated in the coming years to decades, so this is putting a band-aid on a gushing wound. Need more evidence? Read this article, on the future of artificial intelligence, or this one on the importance of automation.

Simply put, Trump is selling a false reality to people who are the most vulnerable to fantasy. If we go too far down this road it not only won't help, but it likely sets us up to be passed by other economies which focus on the future, rather than the past. The future is scary; if you have a skill set that is rapidly becoming unneeded you clearly should have a lot of angst. But moving forward is the only way to secure a prosperous future for our children and their children. Doing what President Trump has promised to do not only won't help the people who voted for him in the Rust Belt in the near term, but in the long term it will prove to be disastrous.