The labor market is slowing, but it’s all good news in the White House.
The U.S. added 139,000 jobs in May, a slight decline from April, according to a jobs report released Friday. The unemployment rate remained at 4.2 percent, still within the ballpark of historic lows reached in 2023, when the unemployment rate reached 3.4 percent—the lowest it had been in more than five decades. But within the folds of the report hid a major red flag for Donald Trump’s agenda: The U.S. is still bleeding manufacturing jobs.
But even the president’s favorite conservative network couldn’t hide its dismay at the slight manufacturing downturn.
“Now, 8,000 manufacturing jobs were lost in May. That’s not what you wanted to see,” said Fox Business host Stuart Varney.
I don’t disagree with your point, but except for electronics, and Italian marble America can make a lot of the materials themselves. The biggest problem is in many cases the price of labour in the US. And for complex things like cars you can’t even move the entire supply chain even if you wanted to.
There was this guy who had a theory that there was nobody on earth who could make a microwave oven, turns out he was right: there are people who can know how to make a certain part of it and other people who knew about it’s assembly nobody can create one start to finish. So imagine with more complex machines how difficult it’d be to bring all those skills and knowledge ‘home’ to America.