It’s not Nobel Prize-caliber econometrics, but here’s a bit of data on manufacturing jobs in the U.S. – you know, the kinds of jobs that Pres. Trump and other NatCons insist that Americans are so desperate to have more of that it’s worthwhile to throw the entire global economy into tariff-powered tantrums in order to achieve. The St. Louis Fed has data on monthly job openings in manufacturing; these data date back to December 2000 and run through February 2025. Here’s a screenshot of a plot of these data.
From December 2000 through November 2007 – that is, until just before the Great Recession – the average monthly number of job openings in manufacturing was 287,000. From December 2007 through February 2025, the average monthly number of job openings in manufacturing was 396,000 – or 38 percent greater than during earlier period.
As my friend W.E. Heasley might put it, just sayin’.
