On October 29, 2019, Reade Pickert writes on Bloomberg:
Three years after Donald Trump campaigned for president pledging a factory renaissance, the opposite appears to be happening.
Manufacturing made up 11% of gross domestic product in the second quarter, the smallest share in data going back to 1947 and down from 11.1% in the prior period, a Commerce Department report showed Tuesday. Figures before 2005 were for full years only.
The latest number compares with 13.4% for real estate, 12.8% for professional and business services and 12.3% for governments, according to the figures on GDP by industry.
Once a powerhouse of the U.S. economy, making up about a quarter of GDP in the 1960s, the manufacturing sector has steadily declined in importance. Trump promised to deliver “victory” to factory workers by bringing production jobs back to the U.S.
While manufacturing has added about half a million workers on the whole since Trump took office, states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin that helped him win in 2016 are now losing factory jobs amid a persistent trade war with China and a weaker global economy.
The administration’s protectionist policies have disturbed companies’ supply chains, stymied investment and slowed hiring. Tariffs on billions of dollars worth of Chinese products helped tip the manufacturing sector into recession earlier this year. Some recent figures suggest stabilization but it remains fragile.
Wednesday’s third-quarter GDP report is forecast to show the economy grew at the second-slowest pace of Trump’s presidency. On Friday, data may show manufacturing jobs dropped 55,000 in October from the prior month, largely reflecting the walkout of thousands of General Motors Co. employees.
Gary Reber Comments:
If we do not produce, we cannot consume. It does not occur to the experts that it would solve everything to make all consumers producers, via manufacturing, by owning productive capital assets, thereby giving more people the power to consume by producing.
Stymied investment is the result of the controlling owners of American manufacturing corporations investing in and building manufacturing capabilities for supply chain and finished products in slave-wage labor countries such as Communist China and Communist Vietnam, while gutting our manufacturing capabilities at home.
These people are hoggish traitors and strong tariffs should be applied to their goods and products being imported into the United States to serve as a de-incentive to cripple their further investment in slave-wage labor countries, and decouple our dependency on other countries.
Instead, insured, interest-free capital credit should be extended annually to EVERY American child, woman, and man and used in the way the rich do to finance the growth of viable businesses and buy productive capital that pays for itself out of its own future earnings, then pays income to the owner of the capital once the original acquisition cost is repaid. We not need the existing savings of the already wealthy capital asset ownership class to form and purchase new capital that pays for itself out of its own future earnings.
We desperately need new leaders who will wake Americans up to the evils of concentrated capital ownership and reverse our sinking economy, by empowering EVERY citizen to become fully productive by owning productive capital assets, thereby giving more people the power to consume by producing.
For an in-depth overview of solutions to economic inequality, see my article “Economic Democracy And Binary Economics: Solutions For A Troubled Nation and Economy” at http://www.foreconomicjustice.org/?p=11.