Trump's push to bring back US jobs shows limited results

On Tuesday in Pennsylvania, Trump declared that his tariffs had turned things around for the domestic steel industry and that “now your business is thriving.” But manufacturers of primary metals, which include steel and aluminum, have added fewer than 15,000 jobs since Trump took office, with more than half of those gains coming before Trump imposed tariffs on foreign-made metals last year.

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

Trump won office by tapping into frustration among working-class voters in traditional manufacturing states where economists say up to 2.5 million jobs were lost to Chinese competition in the century’s first decade. And administration officials assert that tariffs are helping to create jobs. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross told a conference in Washington in July that the positive effects of Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs “can be measured on the factory floor.”

Jim Lentz, who oversees North American operations for the Japanese automaker Toyota, has cited the company’s plans to invest $13 billion in American operations over the next several years.

“Thank you, Mr. President, for having such a strong economy for allowing us to be able to do that,” Lentz said at the White House in July.

At a summit in June, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan handed Trump a chart showing Japanese investments in the United States that would yield just under 22,000 new jobs.

While Trump hailed the figures, Commerce Department data show that the rate of Japanese investment growth in the United States has slowed under Trump, compared with Obama’s second term. And companies like Toyota have warned that the president’s determination that foreign autos pose a national-security threat and may be subjected to tariffs could discourage additional investment.

On another front, administration officials point to companies like Mylan and Allergan — which had moved their corporate addresses overseas in a process known as inversion but recently said they would return to the United States — as a sign of success for the tax law. Larry Kudlow, director of the National Economic Council, said last week that “you’re seeing American firms move back.”

When a CNBC interviewer said the Mylan and Allergan moves would not bring back manufacturing jobs, Kudlow agreed. But he said, “You’re also going to have factories moving back in from other places around the world, including China.”

Brad Setser, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who tracks international investment flows, said it was notable that relatively few pharmaceutical companies were moving plants and activity back to the United States from countries like Ireland or Switzerland. Pharmaceutical imports from those countries actually rose in 2018, he noted.

And a May report by researchers at the International Monetary Fund concluded that the investment effect 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.

The tax law reduced the corporate income-tax rate to 21% from a top rate of 35%, and it overhauled the way the United States taxes multinational companies. Data show those changes have encouraged multinational companies to shift hundreds of billions of dollars in profits to their American operations, essentially for accounting purposes, through a process known as repatriation.

Trump often cites repatriation figures as if they reflected direct investment in the United States. That’s wrong, Setser said.

Commerce Department statistics show that the repatriated funds came mainly from low-tax countries like Ireland and Bermuda, where companies had booked profits to minimize tax liability, and not from China or other economic competitors like Japan.

That flow of money “doesn’t mean all that much,” Setser said. “You’re not in any way seeing a shift in real activity back to the United States.”

Researchers from Wall Street financial firms and the Federal Reserve have concluded that companies used repatriated funds mostly to buy back stock.

Administration officials contend that those selling shares will soon invest their proceeds from the buybacks into startups, business expansions or other forms of economic activity.

Harry Moser, founder and president of the Reshoring Initiative, praised Trump’s efforts to bring jobs and investment back to the United States, but said the president’s trade fights appeared to have undercut those efforts last year.

“We are pleased with the over 50% surge in reshoring jobs announced in 2017 and the record number of companies announcing reshoring jobs in 2018,” said Moser, whose group advocates measures to bring back 5 million factory jobs.

But he said efforts to draw investment and jobs to the United States were less successful in 2018 than 2017 because of a stronger dollar, which makes American products more expensive in foreign markets, as well as “uncertainty from the tariffs, dysfunction in Washington and the increasing skilled-workforce shortage.”

Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, an industrial state that Trump carried easily in 2016, said some workers there were growing disillusioned over the president’s failure to deliver jobs to replace those in shuttered factories like the General Motors plant in Lordstown.

“We’re sensing and seeing a betrayal of workers and promises broken over and over again,” Brown said.

Brown has proposed several bills that he says would reverse the outflow of jobs, including tax incentives for companies that invest in the United States and pay workers well. Moser said the aim could be furthered by investment in skills development for manufacturing workers and by the weakening of the dollar — both policies that Trump has pushed.