March 14, 2025 (EIRNS)—In the Administration of President Donald Trump, and among its supporters, there are constant assertions that the White House is determined to revive American manufacturing, from steel and aluminum and motor vehicles, to transistors and semiconductors, not to mention satellites and other space vehicles. The President himself, on March 7, repeatedly drew reporters’ attention to the increase of 9,000 in manufacturing jobs claimed in the non-farm employment report for February, as a sign of that policy. It was the first such gain “in a very long time,” he said; actually, the first since last November.
But there is a stubborn fact in the way of gearing up the American industrial sector. The productivity of the manufacturing sector of the U.S. economy has been stagnant for 15 years. In fact, American manufacturing productivity is no greater, or lower, now than it was in 2010, whether measured by simple labor productivity, or by the more accurate measure of total factor productivity ("technological productivity"). This can be seen in detail on the website for economic research of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, in a blog post from July 2024.
If manufacturing productivity is stagnant or falling over such a substantial period, the productivity growth of other major nations, and certainly of emerging nations’ economies, is outstripping U.S. productivity. This is why the mighty U.S. Treasury sanctions and financial warfare measures fail; they cannot stop the rapid technological advances of nations which are directing credit into new infrastructure and manufacturing facilities. If such national and directed credit is available to firms within nations, and in projects of cooperative infrastructure among nations, their productivity breakthroughs will carry them forward. If the United States national government does not provide such credit to high-technology industrial infrastructure—and it shows no intention of doing so—U.S. trade measures and sanctions against other countries can’t cause any sort of manufacturing boom as the Trump Administration is seeking.