With only a few months to go, President Obama’s goal of 1 million factory jobs will not end well.
Today was Jobs Day, the day when for 15 minutes around 8:30 am, Twitter mentions of terms like “jobs report” briefly spike and Rick Santelli yells his prediction on the nation’s monthly employment figures directly at the CNBC camera.
It’s hard to say how important the jobs figure is to the overall economy. Some have called it an imperfect measure, as it doesn’t account for those among us who are out of work and not actively looking for a position somewhere.
But we’re keeping an eye on it, America. We’ve been keeping an eye on it ever since President Barack Obama campaigned on a promise to help create 1 million new American manufacturing jobs by the end of his second term.
Yup, he said it a lot. But it hasn’t worked out very well. We’re closing in fast on the end of President Obama’s time in office, and manufacturing job creation has been anemic at best. Only 9,000 factory jobs were created in America in July. That means in order to meet the goal the president set himself, the economy will have to create 131,000 manufacturing jobs a month, from now through January 2017.
That’s certainly not gonna happen.
And lest you forget: Today was also Trade Data Day, a term that never trends on Twitter. Some numbers to mull over this weekend:
America’s goods and services trade deficit in June was $44.5 billion. And our goods trade deficit with China alone was $29.8 billion.