Economists dismiss Trump boast to bring back jobs

Washington—Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump vows to bring back the millions of American jobs lost to China and other foreign competitors if voters put him in the White House.

Economists say he wouldn’t stand a chance: Trump’s boundless self-confidence is no match for the global economic forces that took those jobs away.

Since the beginning of 2000, the United States economy has lost 5 million manufacturing jobs. A study published last year by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that between 2 million and 2.4 million jobs were lost to competition from China from 1999 to 2011.

In the crowded field of Republican candidates, Trump has been leading the polls and getting most of the attention. However, he is still considered a longshot for the party’s nomination.

Announcing his presidential bid on June 16, Trump declared: “I’ll bring back our jobs from China, from Mexico, from Japan, from so many places. I’ll bring back our jobs, and I’ll bring back our money.”

Economists were unimpressed. “It’s completely implausible,” said former Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Alan Blinder, a Princeton University economist who has studied the offshoring of American jobs.

Companies shifted lowskill jobs to China in the 2000s because American workers couldn’t compete with Chinese workers earning around $1 an hour. Now China itself is losing lowwage manufacturing jobs to poorer countries, such as Bangladesh and Vietnam.

If America tried to block foreign-made products and make everything at home, prices would skyrocket and foreign countries would likely retaliate by blocking US goods from their countries.

“You can’t turn back the clock,” Blinder said.

But there’s an even bigger problem for those who want to restore US manufacturing employment (now 12.3 million) to its 1979 peak of 19.6 million: Technology has taken many of those jobs for good. Today’s high-tech factories employ a fraction of the workers they used to. General Motors, for example, employed 600,000 in the 1970s. It has 216,000 now — and sells more cars than ever.

“No matter who becomes president,” says economist David Autor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “I cannot foresee a scenario where 5 million additional manufacturing jobs … reappear in the US in the decades ahead.”

That’s especially true with US unemployment at a seven-year low 5.3 percent, a rate close to what economists consider full employment.

Trump, author of The Art of the Deal , said he could have protected American jobs by negotiating smarter trade agreements with US competitors.

“When was the last time anybody saw us beating, let’s say, China in a trade deal?” Trump said in June.  “They kill us. I beat China all the time. All the time.”

But economists say trade deals—for all the political heat they generate—play only a modest role in job creation. “Better trade deals are unlikely to be a panacea,” said Eswar Prasad, professor of trade policy at Cornell University.

Prasad said US policymakers should focus more on investing in things that will improve America’s competitiveness over the long haul—schools, roads and airports, for example. And Blinder said the US should do more to retrain American workers who lose their jobs to foreign competition.

Companies often decide where to locate factories and hire people on factors that can change: labor costs, energy bills, transportation expenses, and proximity to customers.

Currently, several of those factors favor the US over China. The fracking boom has cut energy costs for US-based factories. Chinese wages have soared, while American wages have been flat. In parts of America, land is cheaper than in China.

So some American companies already are bringing jobs back, and some Chinese companies are investing in plants in America. Last year, for example, Chinese glassmaker Fuyao Glass Industry Group Co. announced plans to take over an abandoned GM plant in Moraine, Ohio, near Dayton, and create 800 jobs. AP