Along with news from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that President Obama is now a net job creator — meaning there are more jobs in the economy than when he took office — there’s this interesting fact: President Obama has presided over a turnaround in the creation of manufacturing jobs.
And that’s our number of the day: More than 500,000.
That’s how many jobs we’ve added to the manufacturing sector since January 2010. You all remember manufacturers. They’re the ones who actually make stuff, like cars in Detroit, machinery in Alabama and electronics in Maryland.
But 10 years ago, we seemed to write off this entire sector. It went into free fall after January 2001 and shed 4.5 million jobs by the end of the Bush administration in January 2009. But for more than two years now, it has steadily, quietly gone up, to the tune of half a million new jobs.
It goes to prove that we can save the manufacturing sector — and we should. Making things is better than pushing paper back and forth. So to remanufacture the political phrase of the moment, we really can build that.
