Trump’s Push to Bring Back Jobs to U.S. Shows Limited Results

In Mr. Trump’s first two years in office, companies announced plans to relocate just under 145,000 factory jobs to the United States, according to data and modeling by the Reshoring Initiative, a Washington nonprofit group. That is a record high in the group’s data, which dates back to the late 1980s, but it adds up to less than one month of average job gains in the United States in its decade-long expansion. More than half of those jobs — about 82,000 — were announced in 2017, before Mr. Trump’s tax cuts took effect.

Moreover, the Reshoring Initiative data show fewer than 30,000 jobs that companies say they will relocate to the United States because of Mr. Trump’s tariffs on imported steel, aluminum, solar panels, washing machines and a variety of Chinese goods. Researchers at A.T. Kearney said last month that Mr. Trump’s trade policies, including tariffs, had pushed factory activity not to the United States but to low-cost Asian countries other than China, like Vietnam.

Manufacturers of primary metals, which include steel and aluminum, have added fewer than 15,000 jobs since Mr. Trump took office, with more than half of those gains coming before Mr. Trump imposed tariffs on foreign-made metals last year.

Now manufacturing is struggling amid a global slowdown and fallout from the trade war, which Mr. Trump has escalated by imposing additional tariffs on Chinese goods and by labeling China a “currency manipulator.”

A May report by researchers at the International Monetary Fund concluded that the investment impact of the tax bill “has been smaller than would have been predicted based on the effects of previous U.S. tax-cut episodes” and that the strongest effects on investment were likely to have shown up in the first year after the law was enacted. Morgan Stanley’s Business Conditions Index shows companies’ plans for new investment plummeted this summer.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/13/business/economy/donald-trump-jobs-created.html?emc=rss&partner=rss