On Thursday, the Department of Labor belatedly released the jobs report for September. While there were 119,000 new jobs added during that month according to the preliminary data, another 6,000 manufacturing jobs were lost during the month. Revisions for the previous two months also reduced manufacturing jobs by another 10,000. That brought the total decline to 49,000 since Donald Trump took office.
As Donald Trump has done repeatedly in the past, on Tuesday he claimed that manufacturing is coming back to America:
they were saying two, three years ago when the country was really losing business, not gaining business, that will never be manufacturers again, we’ll never be doing any of these businesses again that are coming back to us in record numbers, AI plants, but maybe even most importantly, in a sense, the auto plants. They’re all pouring back into the United States.
He went on to credit tariffs and last year’s election for that, “And I have to say, because of tariffs, I’ll also say because of November 5th, the election. But because of the tariffs there coming back.”
Someone with a mild grasp of modern manufacturing would know that manufacturing often requires inputs and or equipment that are acquired from foreign countries, making tariffs a negative as much or more than a positive. Donald Trump appears to have no grasp of the impacts of tariffs or much else about economics.
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