Major Media Narrative of the Day: "Manufacturing Jobs Aren't Coming Back." Don't Believe It For a Second!

Here's what we need to bring them back: deregulation, and lots of it

Right on cue, all the big mainstream media players are out with the same headline: “Manufacturing Jobs Aren’t Coming Back,” or some variation of that. Vox, CNN, The Hill, NPR, CNBC, and yes, even Forbes–every one of these outlets has its own version of the new mantra.

Every single one gets too many of the basic facts wrong as well.

No, it isn’t some ironclad law that rich countries automatically become service economies. (They offshore their manufacturing primarily because of the cost of onerous over-regulation.) No, manufacturing output doesn’t automatically fall as a country becomes richer. (America’s output only began to stagnate after the 2008 Great Recession.) No, US manufacturing employment hasn’t fallen steadily for decades. (America’s grew steadily for a decade before Covid.) No, industrial labor productivity assuredly does not explain all the US manufacturing job losses. (It certainly doesn’t begin to explain the wholesale demolishing of whole sectors of US industry like shipbuilding and textiles.)

There were exactly two big moves I called out during last year’s election that America had to make to preserve our existing massive industrial base and bring a good bit more of it back here as well. The first was a reversal of the Biden administration’s ruinous EPA rules on power plant emissions and industrial particulate emissions. The second was a wholesale slashing of the overall regulatory burdens on our manufacturers.

The Trump administration has already delivered on the first (although many states, my MIchigan home included, have their own net-zero regulatory foolishness that will lead to their own deindustrialization soon). And now he’s promising to try to do the second as well.

The big wrench in the works for the naysayers is that reshoring was already happening in a big way even before those moves, according to the latest survey data from the Reshoring Initiative, to the tune of 287,000 new jobs in 2023.

When an “analysis” of why so much of American industry fled offshore fails to even mention regulations, it is not a serious analysis–it is a piece of propaganda. Yet that’s exactly the case with most of the “it can’t be done” articles being tossed out there in this latest coordinated media narrative.

For a better understanding of the utterly devastating effects of hyper-regulation on US manufacturing, please do check out this article by EJ Antoni and Peter St Onge, PhD, and this one by Daniel Ikenson, which contains this little gem:

Whereas the average US company pays approximately $13,000 per employee annually to comply with federal regulations, the average US manufacturer pays more than $29,100 per employee—more than double

Radical deregulation of US manufacturing has to happen.

Pay no attention to the “nattering nabobs of negativism.” Lend your voice in support of those necessary steps our new administration is taking to help make our manufacturers competitive in the global marketplace once again, and continue to believe in the awesome power of the American industrial worker.