Anti-trade protectionists are in power, and they once again promise to “recover a good-paid job” that America has been “stolen” for many years due to “unfair” foreign competition. Of course, tariffs are the preferred tool for protectionists in the past and present, and President Trump has announced the tariffs as “the most beautiful word in the dictionary.” Trump’s Secretary of Commerce and influential economic adviser Howard Luttonick made Clery very clear in a recent interview that Trump’s tariff goal is to boost US manufacturing employees.
“… Under the Donald Trump Union, workers will have these factors back and those workers will get great jobs and we will produce and produce different America.
Tariffs and tariff rumors wing doubt, confusion and fear over current and future US economic performance. This is a shame as Trump’s broader economic policy package, featuring deregulation, low taxes, cheaper and abundant energy, minimizing government waste, will grow stronger. Trump’s tariffs are doing what the economy has done to the New York giants, and economists are justly saying that the shooting from Trump’s shot, the opposite of productive equality of aagain off-aagain tariff pronunciation.
Others often talked about the economic damages of customs. Here, I would like to take a deeper look at protectionist claims about work – lose them and get them back. Have you lost your manufacturing job? fork. Is this for trade? Is it partly a bad thing? Certainly not. Protectionists make the classic economic mistakes that were left out by Frederick Bastia:
“There is one difference between a bad economist and a good economist. Bad economist is limited to visible effects. A good economist takes into account both the effects that can be seen and the effects that must be foreseen.”
So let’s take a look at the big picture beyond the defeat of employment. And it supports the overall change in the US economy during an era of suspected manufacturing. Fortunately, the data provides a fairly easy indication of the impact of widespread global trade job changes, at least. First, we acknowledge the magnitude of unemployment in the manufacturing industry. As shown in Figure 1, US manufacturing employment fell approximately 1.5 million from the pre-recession level (2006), a decline of 7 million (35%), down from the 1979 record high.
Certainly, the US has been a manufacturing job for decades, raising a small recovery of around 1.5 million people from the lowest point of the Great Recession. The overall trend is apparently supported by the demagogue’s debate on outsourcing and the so-called “industrialization” of America. But manufacturing is just part of the vast US economy. What do you observe when looking at employment across the economy? First, let’s note that total employment numbers are waxing and declining in the business cycle. For example, we experienced a shocking and almost instantaneous pay decline during the competition closures in early 2020. However, within two years it moved to losses. Payroll employment reached 159 million new all-time highs as of the February 2025 employment report. The main thing to be observed is the stable and reliable long-term upward trend in total employment in Figure 2.
Not only is employment growing, but it outweighs population growth due to employment growth. That is, the increase in the number of people available to fill Thue’s jobs – this has been the case for most of the past 40 years, as seen in Figure 3.
In my next post, I will rely on the question, “Is it the fact that more people are making good news for the economy?”
Tyler Watts is a professor of economics and management at Ferris State University.
