For years, Vice President Kamala Harris and President Joe Biden have been touting a high-tech jobs boom, with Harris recently claiming that a manufacturing boom is already underway. However, the numbers tell a different story. Despite Harris’s assertion that the administration has created nearly 800,000 new manufacturing jobs, the reality is that manufacturing employment is shrinking, and the sector is contracting.
The Labor Department’s latest revision of job numbers reveals that employers added 818,000 fewer jobs in the 12 months through March than initially estimated, including a downward revision of 115,000 jobs in manufacturing. This means that instead of adding 19,000 manufacturing jobs, the economy actually shed 96,000 jobs.
Harris’s claim of 800,000 new manufacturing jobs is also misleading, as it measures the baseline from the pandemic’s depths. Many of these jobs were not new but rather regained after lockdowns were lifted and the economy reopened. Using a more accurate baseline, the actual gain is a mere 56,000 jobs since February 2020, and a paltry 8,000 jobs compared to peak factory employment under Trump in early 2019.
The Biden-Harris administration’s legislative efforts, including the Inflation Reduction Act, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and the CHIPS and Science Act, have come with a hefty price tag of trillions of dollars. Despite claims of hundreds of billions of dollars in private sector investment, the manufacturing sector continues to contract, with the Institute for Supply Management reporting a deeper contraction in July.
High interest rates, raised by the Federal Reserve to contain inflation fueled by the administration’s deficit spending, have put pressure on the sector. Even with the Fed’s recent approach to cuts and declining longer-term borrowing rates, the sector remains under strain.
As Democrats gather in Chicago to tout job creation and investment, the reality on the ground is a shrinking manufacturing sector. The high costs associated with the administration’s policies have yet to deliver the promised returns, leaving the American manufacturing landscape in a precarious position. The so-called manufacturing boom appears to be nothing more than a mirage, and the challenges facing the sector suggest that a different set of policies is needed to achieve a true manufacturing resurgence.
