How Many Manufacturing Jobs Has Trump Actually Lost?
In Donald Trump’s imagination, trillions of dollars are being invested in the United States. In the real world, factory construction, adjusted for inflation, was down by more than 10 percent from its year ago level, as of August (the most recent data available). Manufacturing employment, based on the data in the monthly employment reports, was down by 73,000 jobs year-over-year in November.
But the actual story on manufacturing employment may be somewhat worse than the monthly jobs data show. The monthly jobs data are based on the Current Employment Situation (CES), a survey that goes to 120,000 businesses and governmental units every month. While it generally gives a reasonably accurate picture of the economy, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has to impute jobs gained for new firms that are not included in the survey and for firms that don’t answer the survey because they have gone out of business. This “birth-death” imputation tends to be inaccurate when the economy hits a turning point, like a recession.
