Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute explains to National Review Online readers why Republicans should not buy into an outdated election message.
It is an article of faith in the Trump campaign that he will “bring our jobs back from China, from Mexico, from Japan, from so many places.” (To be sure, at the cost of raising prices on American consumers — but his campaign doesn’t mention that part.) And The Donald is hardly alone in making this promise. While visiting a factory in Ohio last month, Hillary Clinton assured the audience that she had “always been committed to bringing back manufacturing.” Similar promises can regularly be heard from Bernie Sanders, John Kasich, and even Ted Cruz. There’s hardly a politician out there who doesn’t want to “bring back American jobs.”
But here’s an unwelcome bit of reality for Trump and all his emulators: Those jobs are not coming back.
It is true that manufacturing is a much smaller portion of the American economy than it was in, say, the 1950s. Manufacturing’s share of the U.S. economy is just 12.1 percent of GDP, compared with a peak of 28.1 percent in 1953. But that’s not because, as anti-trade zealots would have it, “we don’t make things any more.” U.S. manufacturing’s value added in 2014 hit an all-time high of $2.1 trillion, compared to just $110 billion in 1953 (in constant dollars). Yes, a lot of the things you find at your local Wal-Mart are made somewhere else, but that’s because U.S. manufacturing has shifted toward high-end products. The U.S. manufacturing sector is so robust that the stock of foreign direct investment exceeds $1 trillion, far more than foreigners invest in our competitors.
Manufacturing has declined as a share of the overall U.S. economy, not because our manufacturing sector has been “hollowed out,” but because other industry sectors have grown even faster. This includes industries, like information technology, that barely existed in the 1950s. For instance, in terms of value added, professional, scientific, and technical services contribute four times more to GDP today than they did in 1955.
That’s a good thing. It’s called progress. After all, do American parents really aspire to have their children sitting at a sewing machine making shirts? Or do they want their children to become doctors, computer programmers, or technology specialists — good jobs with good futures.
