The U.S. economy hemorrhaged manufacturing jobs in August despite the Biden administration’s attempt to boost the industry with hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies.
The number of people employed in manufacturing in the U.S. fell by 24,000 in August, with the industry down 14,000 jobs year-over-year, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Altogether, manufacturing employment has grown just 0.3% since the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the Chips and Science Act were signed into law by President Joe Biden in August 2022, despite the bills earmarking more than $400 billion in subsidies for the industry.
The August decline is in addition to a recent BLS jobs revision that showed the federal government had overestimated manufacturing employment by 115,000 between April 2023 and March 2024.
“Despite hundreds of billions in Inflation Reduction Act subsidies going to manufacturing and the mind-boggling U.S. deficit, we’ve only seen a less-than-1% increase in total employment,” Aaron Hedlund, director of research at the America First Policy Institute, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “There is no manufacturing boom.”
The U.S. national debt currently sits at around $35.34 trillion as of Aug. 4, up from $27.75 trillion when Biden took office in January 2021, according to the U.S. Treasury Department. The increase of more than $7.5 trillion dollars is equivalent to over $57,000 for each of the 131,434,000 households that the Census Bureau estimates were in the U.S. in 2023.
Average weekly earnings in manufacturing rose from roughly $1,361 to approximately $1,370 in August, according to BLS data. Weekly earnings remain below their levels from when Biden first took office when adjusted for inflation, with manufacturing salaries rising 17.7% between January 2021 and August 2024, while inflation in that period was roughly 20%, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis and the BLS.
In July 2023, the White House issued a press release claiming the U.S. was in the midst of a “manufacturing boom” driven largely by federal initiatives from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the CHIPS and Science Act and the IRA to boost domestic green technology and semiconductor production. $84 billion worth of the nearly $228 billion of manufacturing projects worth more than $100 million that the Biden administration subsidized via the IRA and the Chips and Science Act have been paused or delayed, according to an investigation from the Financial Times published in August.
“All of the Biden-Harris administration claims on job creation are essentially false,” Peter Earle, a senior economist at the American Institute for Economic Research, told the DCNF. “Most of the rise in employment they are taking responsibility for are actually just jobs slowing returning after being destroyed by pandemic policies — most of all, lockdowns. A sizable number of the remainder of jobs that have appeared over the past three-and-a-half years are not jobs created via economic growth and commercial expansion, but rather a product of their massive debt and deficit policies.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the DCNF.
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