Trump's 'Getting Jobs Home' Is A Pipe Dream

A recent Reuters story details how 6 years ago, in President Donald Trump's first term, LVMH's billionaire and CEO Bernard Arnault joined the US president to open a designer handbags factory for the Louis Vuitton luxury brand in rural Texas.

- GURBIR SINGH

Over the years, the sprawling site at an old ranch has ranked among the worst-performing LVMH units. Workers have been unable to meet the high standards of design, resulting in waste and damaged products.

What was projected to generate 1,000 high-skilled jobs is today struggling with just 300 hands.

Meanwhile, in response to Presidents Trump's call to bring back manufacturing to the US, derisive memes in China's booming social media have been lampooning the return of the American blue collar. Obese and awkward white, males are pictured clumsily struggling with sewing machines trying to thread Nike shoes or screw on iPhone covers. Trump's sweeping tariffs are about getting manufacturing back to the US.

His math is: make importing goods to the US so expensive, that industries and production lines will come back home. He has been consistent on the theme for over four decades blaming past presidents for sacrificing US industries and jobs.

In his second term, he has gone about it with a vengeance.

"American steel workers, auto workers, farmers and skilled craftsmen... They watched in anguish as foreign leaders have stolen our jobs, foreign cheaters have ransacked our factories," Trump said from the White House Rose Garden last week. But can Trump recreate the manufacturing heydays of the 1950s?

Turning the clock back

The USA in the 1950s was a different place. It had won the World War and was the least unscathed among the Western Allies. While Europe and England were devastated, American industries were booming, accounting for one-third of the world's exports while taking in only a tenth of all imports.