Do Americans Really Want To Bring Back Manufacturing?
President Donald Trump pledged that he would make America “a manufacturing nation once again,” during his inauguration speech. Since then, Trump has issued a number of executive orders to this end. But most Americans say that they would not be better off if they worked in a factory.
That’s according to the Cato Institute’s 2024 Globalization and Trade Survey, which recently went viral. The report found that 80 percent of Americans think the country would be better if more Americans worked in factories, but only 25 percent think they would be better if they worked in a factory.
Republican pollster Frank Luntz described the Cato poll as “a Rorschach test for people on both sides of the free trade debate.” Protectionists conclude that the country can increase manufacturing jobs, which account for 8 percent of total nonfarm employment, because 25 percent of respondents say their lives would be better with a factory job. Meanwhile, free traders see that most of the support for manufacturing applies to others working a factory job, not the proponents of manufacturing themselves.
Though the results appear to be inconsistent at first glance, they aren’t. Respondents who don’t think they’d be better off themselves working in manufacturing could argue that the cou
Article from Reason.com
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