Supporting manufacturing employment: No president has tried so of course it has never worked
Quibbling with headlines is annoying, I know, but I was provoked by the title of economist Jason Furman’s New York Times piece last week: “Every President Tries It. It Never Works.” The “it” being referred to here is “reversing the loss of manufacturing jobs.”
The provocation was the “every president tries” part. If “trying” is defined as changing policy to consistently support employment growth in U.S. manufacturing, no president has tried in my lifetime to do this. Amazingly, doing nothing has indeed failed. Doing nothing was also the wrong choice.
The loss of manufacturing jobsFirst, some data to define the problem. Furman focuses on the share of total employment that is in manufacturing. He notes that many structural non-policy forces (like technology and what people demand as countries get richer) put steady downward pressure on this in any growing country. There’s a lot of truth in that.
But the U.S. got much richer between 1965 and 2000—in fact it got richer at a far faster pace than it has since, so both technology and the different demands of a richer society should have been operating a lot less intensely since then. And yet the level of U.S. manufacturing employment was steady during that period, fluctuating roughly between 17.0 and 19.5 million depending on the state of the business cycle (see Figure A). After 35 years of stability, manufacturing jobs then cratered: 3 million manufacturing jobs were lost after the recession of 2001, and the 2003–2007 recovery saw essentially no gain at all in manufacturing jobs—the first manufacturing jobless recovery we’ve ever experienced. Then another 3 million jobs were lost during the Great Recession of 2008–09.
After falling from over 17 million to just over 11 million between 2000 and 2010, the sector has seen only very slow growth since. The new high point of manufacturing employment in the recent past was 12.9 million workers in early 2023.
Manufacturing historically lost a disproportionate share of jobs during recessions, but what kept it from gaining jobs back quickly in the early 2000s and 2010s recoveries the way it usually had? One huge influence was the emergence of a large trade deficit in manufactured goods. In those decades, the deficit peaked at 4.4% of GDP in 2005 (see Figure B). After being forced into improvement by the Great Recession and the collapse of American spending on all goods and services (including imports), it has steadily moved back toward this peak and surpassed it in recent years.
Policy measures can close the trade deficit and reshore manufacturing jobs
Tolerating this rise of the U.S. trade deficit was a policy choice. The deficit’s rise was driven by a dollar whose value is too high to allow balanced trade. A high dollar makes our exports expensive to foreign consumers and makes foreign imports cheap for U.S. residents. Hence, it leads directly to chronic trade deficits (see Figure C). Any serious effort at boosting manufacturing employment would require using policy levers to reduce the value of the U.S. dollar.
What are these currency policy levers? First, policy would need to prevent other countries’ governments from actively managing the value of their currency to give their exports a competitive advantage against U.S.-produced goods. There are many ways to do this. Currency management is done through other countries’ governments (or their proxies) buying U.S. dollar-denominated assets (like Treasury bonds or mortgage-backed securities) to bid up the demand for dollars. There’s no particular reason the U.S. couldn’t undertake countervailing currency intervention and buy other countries’ assets whenever they bought ours in an effort to manage their currency’s value. Or we could tax foreign purchases of U.S. assets.
Second, we could raise taxes domestically to close fiscal deficits. In coming years unless we run into a recession (which the Iran conflict makes more likely), there is likely to be sustained upward pressure on interest rates stemming from the big increases in fiscal deficits locked in by the Republican mega tax and spending bill. Higher interest rates in the U.S. will attract foreign investors to U.S. assets, which will bid up the value of the U.S. dollar further and harm manufacturing.
Third, we could hasten the inevitable deflation of the AI-driven stock market bubble, which has attracted foreign investors looking to make high returns. All else equal, there would be less upward pressure on the U.S. dollar if foreign investors were not rushing in to buy dollars to purchase U.S. stocks.
Fourth, we could accelerate the transition to cleaner energy. The U.S. has swung from being a large net importer to a net exporter of oil and natural gas. This has greatly increased foreign demand for U.S. dollars simply to buy our energy supplies, which pushes up the value of the dollar and hurts U.S. manufacturing.
Finally, we could reform our corporate tax code to stop its bias toward offshoring both paper profits and real production. The swing toward a large trade deficit in the pharmaceuticals sector, for example, can be linked directly to the first Trump administration’s changes in the corporate tax code.
In short, taking currency seriously would mean going against some very powerful economic interests—finance, tech, pharmaceuticals, and fossil fuels—in the name of helping U.S. manufacturing. But it would be a good trade to make. And to be clear, dollar weakness that is caused not by intentional policy decisions but is simply an outcome of erratic policy decisions will not provide any sustained benefits to U.S. manufacturing. U.S. manufacturing needs a competitive value of the dollar and a healthy and stable domestic economy. Engineering dollar decline by sabotaging the stability of the domestic economy does not help.
How many jobs could be reshored if currency policy somehow closed the U.S. manufacturing trade deficit? Very roughly it would be close to 3 million. This would not change the long-run trend in the manufacturing share of employment, but it would boost manufacturing-based communities around the country.
Indifference to manufacturing was bad for economic dynamismThe long-run gains to rebuilding communities of manufacturing process knowledge in the U.S. could be large. U.S. losses and China’s growing dominance in manufacturing are in large part a story of deconstructing communities of process knowledge in the U.S. and building them in China. These communities are geographic clusters where firms and workers specialize in particular manufacturing sub-sectors. The agglomeration of knowledge and skills leads to steady innovation which further locks in the competitive advantage of the cluster and raises productivity growth.
Currency policy destroyed these clusters in the U.S. and provided ample space for them to grow in China. The large and constant pressure of an overvalued dollar in the U.S. imposes a heavy drag on the prospects of new manufacturing firms setting up shop and becoming a center for clusters like these. The currency policy of China surely acted as the reverse of this, clearing huge competitive space for new entrants and for further growth in communities of process knowledge.
Currency management was not China’s only industrial policy measure, but it is the one that allowed an across-the-board competitive advantage in all manufacturing industries. And it is the only industrial policy in the U.S. that would reclaim some of the across-the-board manufacturing disadvantage we’ve allowed to be imposed on our domestic industry. Targeted protection and subsidies for particular sub-industries in manufacturing have been important in crafting the exact patterns of trade, but it is currency policy that largely explains the manufacturing-wide trade deficit that the U.S. runs with China and other countries that manage their currency.
How big is this problem of losing expertise and process knowledge in manufacturing for the overall economy? Another sign of the indifference towards manufacturing shown by successive U.S. policymakers is that we don’t even really know—and this indifference and the ignorance it generates has grown over the past year of the Trump administration. The manufacturing sector used to be a source of productivity dynamism in the U.S. economy, but recent data indicate that as we hemorrhaged millions of jobs we also saw declining productivity growth in the sector. This productivity decline might not be entirely genuine—it might be a problem with statistical measurement. It would be nice to invest in our data-gathering infrastructure to shed more light on this issue, but instead the parts of the Bureau of Labor Statistics who have the expertise to do this have been gutted by the Trump administration and longer-run cuts. Another angle of taking manufacturing seriously would be supporting the public structures that provide needed inputs to know what’s even happening in the sector.
Doing nothing was a mistakeU.S. presidents have made the implicit judgement over the past 50 years that it’s a good trade for Americans to have a smaller domestic manufacturing sector in return for cheap imports of manufactured goods, even if that means we’re running chronic large trade deficits. It’s not so obvious to me that’s a good trade, and there’s one last angle that makes it even less obvious.
The foreign inflow of capital that is the mirror image of the trade deficit in manufactured goods is essentially investors abroad bidding against Americans who are looking to buy stocks and bonds and other assets to build their wealth. Bidding up the price of these assets means long-run returns will be lower. In short, this current system of trade imbalances lowers the returns to holding wealth for U.S. residents. One could argue that this is mostly a problem for wealthy U.S. households, who own the lion’s share of assets.
But there is also the issue of why the valuation of U.S. assets has grown in recent decades even aside from increased foreign demand. A huge part of this growth is a zero-sum transfer of income from labor earnings to corporate profits: Recent estimates have this transfer accounting for almost half of the entire nominal growth in the value of U.S. corporate equities in the last 40 years.
Absent foreign demand for U.S. assets, some of this loss to wages would have been counterbalanced for at least some subset of U.S. households by higher rates of return to their savings. To be clear, this zero-sum transfer from wages to wealth still would have been a negative development for the vast majority within the U.S. economy. But this transfer combined with the fact that most of the gains accrue to investors outside of the U.S. because of imbalances in trade and investment flows make it even more damaging. Essentially, U.S. households as workers feel all the pain of a campaign of wage suppression, but U.S. households as investors do not claim all of the benefits of this wage suppression.
Presidents have not tried to reverse manufacturing job lossIn the end, no president in my lifetime has made a serious and consistent effort to do what is necessary to make the U.S. dollar stay at values commensurate with balanced trade in manufacturing. Ronald Reagan famously negotiated the Plaza Accord, which pressured Germany and Japan (our two biggest trade-deficit partners at the time) to reflate their own economies and to stop currency intervention. But at the same time, Reagan ramped up military spending and made large tax cuts that put huge upward pressure on interest rates and led to huge trade deficits in the early 1980s. Bill Clinton oversaw smaller fiscal deficits but actively encouraged a “strong dollar policy” which saw the dollar hit some of its highest levels on record. This strong dollar policy and support for a punitive rescue package for countries slammed by the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s led to another large increase in U.S. trade deficits. The Clinton administration’s support for permanent normalized trade relations (PNTR) with China and for China’s entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO) made it harder for subsequent administrations to apply pressure to China to abandon its significant currency management in the 2000s.
George W. Bush refused to address the Chinese currency management and undertook large tax cuts and increased military spending again, pushing up interest rates and leading to another round of large trade deficits. Barack Obama similarly failed to address currency management, even leaving it out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement he pushed hard in his final years in office. Donald Trump passed corporate tax changes that actively incentivized offshoring in his first term in office. His major trade policy change in the second term has been chaotic and fluctuating—though generally high and broad—tariffs across manufacturing. Manufacturing employment in 2025 averaged 157,000 lower than in 2024 even as the administration trumpeted these large tariff increases. That constitutes the worst non-recessionary year for manufacturing since 2004.
Furman is right that we have seen consistent presidential failure to support employment in manufacturing. And he’s right that most of these presidents made some rhetorical commitment to manufacturing that makes this failure jarring. But nothing serious was ever really tried, and that was a costly mistake.
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