72,000 fewer people work in U.S manufacturing than when Trump made his April tariffs announcement.
“2025 should have been a good year for manufacturing employment, and that didn’t happen,” economist Michael Hicks, director of the Center for Business and Economic Research at Ball State in Muncie, Indiana told the Washington Post. “I think you really have to indict tariffs for that.”
“The manufacturing job losses that we see now are really just the beginning of what will be a pretty grim couple of quarters as manufacturing adjusts to a new lower level of demand,” Hicks added.
Even in high priority areas, such as tech, have felt the tariff impact. Semiconductor manufacturers have shed more than 13,000 jobs since April.
“Every time I hear manufacturing is booming, I scream at the TV,” J.B Brown, CEO of BCI Solutions Inc., a metal foundry in Bremen, Indiana, told Reuters.
Overall in 2025, the U.S. labor market added about 584,000 jobs, the slowest pace of job growth since 2020, and about a quarter of the job figure growth seen in 2024 during President Biden’s last year in office.
Obvious_Chapter2082 on
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: tariffs lower our domestic consumption **and** our exports, so there’s no reason for tariffs to spur any kind of manufacturing. There’s nowhere for those manufactured goods to go
Our manufacturing has declined over time for three reasons
– our labor costs are high
– the tax cost to manufacture in the US is high
– we have a strong dollar
You can fix #2, but you shouldn’t attempt to fix the other two. We need to let our nostalgia over manufacturing jobs go
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From the article:
72,000 fewer people work in U.S manufacturing than when Trump made his April tariffs announcement.
“2025 should have been a good year for manufacturing employment, and that didn’t happen,” economist Michael Hicks, director of the Center for Business and Economic Research at Ball State in Muncie, Indiana told the Washington Post. “I think you really have to indict tariffs for that.”
“The manufacturing job losses that we see now are really just the beginning of what will be a pretty grim couple of quarters as manufacturing adjusts to a new lower level of demand,” Hicks added.
Even in high priority areas, such as tech, have felt the tariff impact. Semiconductor manufacturers have shed more than 13,000 jobs since April.
“Every time I hear manufacturing is booming, I scream at the TV,” J.B Brown, CEO of BCI Solutions Inc., a metal foundry in Bremen, Indiana, told Reuters.
Overall in 2025, the U.S. labor market added about 584,000 jobs, the slowest pace of job growth since 2020, and about a quarter of the job figure growth seen in 2024 during President Biden’s last year in office.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: tariffs lower our domestic consumption **and** our exports, so there’s no reason for tariffs to spur any kind of manufacturing. There’s nowhere for those manufactured goods to go
Our manufacturing has declined over time for three reasons
– our labor costs are high
– the tax cost to manufacture in the US is high
– we have a strong dollar
You can fix #2, but you shouldn’t attempt to fix the other two. We need to let our nostalgia over manufacturing jobs go