Manufacturing Growing 714% Faster Under Trump than Obama

I'm more inclined to go with the profit motive. But that is my experience I guess.
I built disk drives. They are built in China. Not because China stole the idea (they didn't) but because you had to build them there to stay competitive.

 

Yes, both are still going, although under different names.

I am biased towards Manufacturing. We can't prosper as a Nation by simply servicing and repairing another Nations output.

 

I'm just wondering what is behind the numbers. What are all of these new durable goods manufacturing jobs for, exactly?

 

A lot of auto manufactures disagree with you.

 

Why do you call it the obama curve? Trump has increased rather dramatically.

 

I'm sure you are correct. The thing for me is that Trump's economy is not the unmitigated disaster that all the liberal's claimed it would be.

 

I like manufacturing, but having been an engineer I think America's future is in innovation, not manufacturing.
I'm an old fart so I saw the evolution in my field. When I first started if I wanted to save some money I looked at parts cost, seldom ever at labor. In those days we could build a 100 mb disk drive for about 10K and sell it for 20K.
When I retired it was the opposite. A terabyte could be built for about $40 and sold at retail for about $100.
We employed about 5,000 in R&D and about 6 or 7,000 in China building them. Over 90% of the parts were made in Asia.

 

Problem is, we won't know for a few more quarters. The trade war is really starting to wear on American Farmers - Trump is building manufacturing on their backs.

 

It doesn't have to be one or the other. Why not both?

 

We sent a guy to China to work as a consultant. They paid for our services but there was a conditional agreement between parties that they would be trained on the technology we were providing. In other words. OK, you come here. We need your skills. You train us so we no longer need your skills.

 

No modern country has ever prospered by servicing the products another country manufactures. There is insufficient profit available to do that.

When you service someone else's products, you can only charge by the hour, and markup the replacement parts you sell.

In manufacturing, labor cost is spread across all products produced. As a result, much higher wages are possible, and you can still profit from proving the service and other support that goes along with it.

The only limitation to profit in manufacturing in production speed and capacity. In the service sector, it's hours of the day.

Which one has the greater variable?

 

I don't know much about economics (and to be frank I don't think anyone posting here knows very much about it either).

But I do know that posters here predicted an immediate stock market meltdown and a brutal depression the day after Trump was elected. It didn't happen.

If the US ends up as the second largest producer of soybeans instead of the largest, well, so much the worse for soybean farmers which are probably giant agribusinesses, not crusty old farmers riding tractors, anyway. If a few million Americans can get decent manufacturing jobs because of the tariffs, then I am all for them.

 

I like that thought, and that's how it worked in the old days.
I would add to your limitations example labor costs.
So now you have production speed (substitute automation), capacity, and labor cost.
Anyone can add capacity, so the other two are why employment in manufacturing has fallen. I see no reason for that to reverse itself.

 

Not just the old days, but how it works today.

Automation is great when it comes to repetitive manufacturing steps and cycles. It can insure a greater tolerance across production runs, especially in the manufacture of components that require precise assembly. But it's not suited to processes with many variables, and multiple unpredictable manipulations.

For example, assembling a circuit board is perfect for robotics, because time and space don't vary by component, cleanliness is critical, and each subassembly can be precise in measure. Other types of manufacturing involve processes that aren't so finite and exacting.

There are many manufacturing process that do not lend themselves easily to automation. People need to stop paying attention to that kind of talk.

Automation will never fully replace human hands on the production line.

 

Its doing YOU good if you own stocks, are looking for a job or a pay increase.

Note from the link under Obama government employment increased about like manufacturing is under Trump, the situation is reversed.

 

What I don't believe are the numbers being cited.

According to Statista there were 14,462,000 manufacturing jobs at the end of 2014. At the end of 2016, the last year of the Obama presidency, there were 14,777,700 manufacturing jobs. That's an increase of 315,700 manufacturing jobs.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/664993/private-sector-manufacturing-employment-in-the-us/

Statista doesn't have the 2018 manufacturing jobs number but in 2017 the number of manufacturing jobs in the United States dropped from the 14,777,700 to 14,656100 for a loss of 121,600 manufacturing jobs. Whatever manufacturing jobs were added is really unimportant because the per capita manufacturing workforce continues to decline regardless of these annual small up and down bumps. In 1989 we had over 20 million people employed in manufacturing and the decline began. We had a small bump in 1997 and then a constant decline down to 13.25 million in 2010 due to the 2008 recession.

Since 2010 there was a slow but steady increase manufacturing employment until 2017 where, as noted, there was a small loss of just over 100,000 manufacturing jobs. I don't have the manufacturing employment numbers for 2018 but whatever they are they're not going to make up for the loss of manufacturing jobs per capita and a few hundred thousand jobs over a one or two year span mean nothing compared to the 7 million manufacturing jobs lost during a time when US manufacturing almost doubled productivity..

 

Still waiting!!

 

Why would we want to go back to tepid?

 

No he hasn’t.

 

How growth in manufacturing jobs drove January’s strong economic results

Number twice what was expected.

 

Are you counting the thousands they are just laying off?
Probably not....

 

Competition.

 

You are right! I'm "none of the above", so, Trump's big tax cut didn't 'do' anything for me.

Too bad Trump didn't go through the U. S. Tax Code like the proverbial "Wrath of God" -- getting rid of all the shelters, loopholes, exclusions, exemptions, deductions, and "carried interest". But why would he even try? No president has even thought about doing THAT -- Republican or Democrat....

 

Yeah well I remember being a member of Hannity's board and people telling me that we would be eating dog food by the time Obama's first term was up. People tend to exaggerate when they don't like how something turns out.

 

Why the falsehood?
https://qz.com/175157/barack-obama-has-shrunk-the-us-federal-workforce-more-than-ronald-reagan/