U.S. Has Lost Manufacturing Jobs Every Month Since ‘Liberation Day’
https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-dow-sp-500-nasdaq-01-09-2026/card/u-s-has-lost-manufacturing-jobs-every-month-since-liberation-day–zSktO9HE1fJuovugQy8V?mod=mhp
Posted by AbundanceLiberal
9 Comments
What our policymakers with 19th century views don’t understand is that for modern products, you need a diverse supply of inputs to make things.
For the United States this means that roughly half of all our imports are infact *inputs* to the manufacturing sector.
Hard to make a car without the infotainment screen made in South Korea for instance. Even our semiconducting firms require vast globalized supply chains for everything from raw materials to masks to lithography equipment.
Cutting yourself off from trade via protectionist tariff walls means you’ve cut off your own firms ability to get critical resources needed to operate. That is a lot of damage, even before we talk about retaliation from trade partners (ask our Whiskey companies how business is going in Canada…).
The primary goals of tariffs seem to be i) raise revenue and ii) force US companies to stop investing in China.
US manufacturing won’t ever be globally competitive, since labor & manufacturing costs are so much cheaper in 3rd world countries.
Trump never wanted manufacturing jobs. What he wants is uneducated purposeless men who have no aspirations for higher learning, no hope for jobs, who resent people different from them, who will sign up to be deployed to Venezuela in hopes of finding some meaning in their lives
Manufacturing with higher value add can have thousands of supply chains. Guess what happens when you blanket tariffs in that type of ecosystem.
Because most of our manufacturing depends highly on imports. It’s a global economy. And now those imports are being tarriffed to hell and back. Manufacturers are shutting down because they can’t get the ingredients they need for their products.
I know it LOOKS that way, I get it. But if you join us in clown world, you will find you can flip any negative number or chart upside down and the whole outlook is brighter.
Not surprising, given that tariffs ultimately lower our exports too, as well as our domestic consumption. What would more manufacturing be used for in this case?
Even in the absence of tariffs, our labor costs and our tax costs of manufacturing are too high in the US to meaningfully bring back those jobs. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing at all, as long as we have good relationships with other countries we can trade with
I’ve watched the chemicals industry go from hundreds of billions in planned capex and expanding capacity in Jan 2025 to zero capex and asset sales in Jan 2026 thanks to tariffs and dropping demand. My new favorite term is “run to failure” and once the line fails, it’s done.
We’ve lost our biggest export markets for some products (China and Brazil) and we continue to see production leave the US despite our huge cost advantages from shale gas as a feedstock.
This is the result of a dumb short-sighted ill conceived plan put into action before the necessary supports were put into place. The Administration also failed to recognize the response to these would weaken America’s position of control. Every ally is backing away slowly and building trade deals without the US, because they can no longer be trusted. Trump just sped up the demise of the US’s control over markets. In the words of the great Bugs Bunny…what a Maroon!