Despite data showing that manufacturers are significantly less keen than the president on the industry’s future, President Joe Biden delivered a speech in South Carolina on Thursday praising the administration’s attempt to restore American manufacturing.
The administration’s favorite name for Biden’s extensive spending program as the 2024 election cycle heats up is “Bidenomics,” Biden defended it in his address. Multiple indices and data sets conclude that the American industrial sector has not been revitalized as promised by his economic policies.
Job growth has stalled this month, but shorter workweeks have increased, according to the Philadelphia Federal Reserve’s manufacturing survey, which has indicated contraction for ten months in a row, with new orders (the canary in the coal mine) being negative for more than a year straight.
According to information on its website, new orders for local manufacturers have been falling for ten consecutive months. Manufacturing employment has remained relatively stable, but shorter hours for manufacturing workers have increased in the region, according to the same data, which is a sign of an impending recession when it occurs on a national scale.
As of June 2023 projections, the U.S. manufacturing sector has created almost 200,000 additional employment compared to pre-pandemic January 2020 levels, as the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported.
With output and new orders continuing to fall, the U.S. manufacturing purchasing managers’ index (PMI) touched a six-month low in June 2023, prompting Biden’s address. According to Investopedia, the Institute for Supply Management (ISM) compiles the manufacturing PMI by polling industry insiders to gauge sentiment about the sector’s general current trend and future business prospects.
A White House spokesman said that the BLS data shows a disparity of “nearly 800,000,” or 788 thousand. According to the BLS statistics, the 12.196 million number used as a baseline by the Biden administration equates to around 590,000 fewer manufacturing employment than before the pandemic in January 2020.
According to information posted on its website, the New York branch of the Federal Reserve has seen a shift in the industry’s optimism about its future business prospects alongside persistently low planned investment in the region’s manufacturing. Supply chain price rises have also continued to dampen optimism in the industry, but the prognosis for the next six months improved somewhat in June.
