Bullshit Vice President Pence Says

Here’s what the data actually show about the purported “blue-collar boom” under the Trump administration: The U.S. gained roughly 500,000 U.S. manufacturing jobs from 2016 to 2019. But these gains are exactly on par with gains across the entire economic recovery period from 2010 to 2019, during which 166,000 manufacturing jobs were gained each year, on average. The 2016–2019 gains did not represent an improvement over prior years in that decade, and even the decade’s overall gains had managed to restore only a fraction of the jobs lost in the prior decade.
And recent years’ manufacturing gains were abruptly wiped out by the COVID-19 crisis—with a staggering 740,000 manufacturing jobs lost this year, as shown in Figure B (BLS 2020). If President Trump wants to take credit for the job growth at the tail end of a decade of recovery from the Great Recession, then he must also own this collapse, thanks to his administration’s mismanagement of the pandemic—including a refusal to organize an effective national response (Scott 2020b). And while the June 2020 data show an upswing in manufacturing jobs, more recent jobs data indicate that the nascent and partial recovery in manufacturing is at risk due to recurrence of COVID-19 in states that have reopened, including many in the South and Western United States (Hannon and Kiernan 2020; WSJ Pro 2020; Bartash 2020).

Click to expand...