Can he keep his promises?

[Legion Troll]

In the hills and hollows of Mingo County, W.Va., where unemployment is nearly triple the national average, it’s coal.

On the southwest side of Chicago, where the landscape couldn’t be more different but the economic fears are much the same, it’s Oreo cookies.

Elsewhere, it is cars, computers and air-conditioners.

And whether it is through rolling back regulations, imposing tariffs or making some none-too-discreet phone calls from the Oval Office to the C-suites, Donald J. Trump has vowed to bring back the vanishing jobs of miners, bakers and assembly-line workers, beginning on Day 1 of his administration.

“It’s going to happen fast,” Trump recently told a cheering crowd in Charleston, W.Va. “This is so easy.”

If only that were true.

For all of the appeal his message might have for residents there (Mr. Trump captured almost 90 percent of the vote in Mingo County), much of what he is promising to do — on his own, and through congressional legislation — couldn’t be accomplished in the first 1,000 days of a Trump administration, much less the first 100.

For example, Mr. Trump has suggested easing clean-air regulations enacted by Democrats and Republicans alike that have hurt the coal industry. But King Coal is unlikely to ever recapture market share lost in recent years to natural gas made cheap by the fracking boom, not to mention fast-growing alternative energy sources like wind and solar.

Nor could Trump force steel makers to buy coal from Appalachia to heat furnaces in Asia, Europe and North America that have been idled by weak demand.

“It’s very unlikely he’ll be able to restore coal to where it was,” said John Deskins, director of the West Virginia University Bureau of Business and Economic Research. With production and employment in the mines down by about a third since 2008, Deskins said, “even in our most optimistic scenario, we don’t expect a big bounce back.”



http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/22/business/economic-promises-a-president-trump-could-and-couldnt-keep.html

 

[Legion Troll]

Teflon Don Trump has been claiming that he’s going to get Apple to make its products in America again but the economic truth is what Apple’s Steve Jobs once told Obama: Those jobs are never coming back.

Assembly of the iKit can either be done by Chinese robots or American robots but it’s just not going to be done by humans.

This is reflected in the manner in which electronics assembly has been a low-paid job ($13 or $14 an hour, well below U.S. median wages) for some years now.

It is also proven by the manner in which even Chinese labor is becoming too expensive to do the work.

Foxconn has just replaced 60,000 workers with robots.

This isn’t an isolated example. The nostalgia for the days of mass employment in manufacturing is just that–nostalgia. It is not something that should be guiding our public policy.

The entire world is losing manufacturing jobs to automation. Even China’s manufacturing workforce is shrinking. The only choice now is whether the robots will be there or here.




http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2016/05/27/trump-neednt-bother-apple-about-manufacturing-in-america-foxconn-replaces-60000-with-robots/#53c15fae58a2