If J. D. Vance is really going to be the Trump campaign’s “policy attack dog,” as Audrey Fahlberg and Brittany Bernstein report, he probably should get a handle on policy.
Let’s start with trade. He has a line in his stump speech about Kamala Harris and NAFTA. As delivered today in Michigan:
Remember, this is the woman who voted to preserve NAFTA, to extend NAFTA, the very trade deal that sent American auto jobs to Mexico by the tens of thousands and turned American dreams into nightmares.
Kamala Harris has hardly moved a muscle in her political life without getting organized labor’s permission. The unions opposed NAFTA, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and the USMCA, the new version of NAFTA that the Trump administration negotiated. So Harris opposed all three. She obviously wasn’t in the Senate in 1993 when the NAFTA vote happened, but she said in 2019 that she would have voted against it if she had the chance.
A Vance spokesman has said previously that Vance is criticizing Harris for having voted against the USMCA, which she did as a senator in 2020. But she did that because she doesn’t support NAFTA. Despite lots of bluster from Trump, the USMCA is largely identical to NAFTA, with some modernizations for digital goods and some minor tweaks on automobiles and a few other specific categories. Because Harris opposes NAFTA, it makes perfect sense that she voted against basically-the-same-thing-as-NAFTA.
As for automotive-industry employment in Michigan, far more jobs were lost to automation and to other parts of the United States than to Mexico or any foreign country. As Philip Thompson wrote for NR last week:
Since 1990, auto-manufacturing employment in Michigan is down by 50 percent. In Ohio, it is down by 43 percent. Together that’s 65,000 jobs lost.
But in the Sun Belt, auto-manufacturing employment is increasing. In the same period, auto-manufacturing employment in Alabama went up by 5,250 percent, in Texas by 272 percent, and in Kentucky by 127 percent. That’s 46,000 jobs gained between the three. Nationally, employment in the sector today is basically the same as it was in 1990.
Here’s U.S. automotive-manufacturing employment since 1990, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics:
As Thompson wrote, it’s basically the same today as in 1990. But there was significant variation in between. Was it caused by NAFTA? Probably not, just given the years of things. NAFTA came into effect on January 1, 1994. Aside from a blip in July 1998, U.S. automotive-manufacturing employment increased or held steady from 1994 all the way to 2000. It then declined from then until the Great Recession. Since then, with the exception of Covid, it has steadily increased.
It also simply takes fewer people to assemble cars today than it did many decades ago, because of automation. That’s a good thing, and as the graph shows, it doesn’t mean the number of automotive-manufacturing jobs will always go down. Greater productivity can create more opportunities for jobs that wouldn’t exist otherwise.
As far as policy is concerned, the threat to U.S. manufacturing jobs is not from trade. It is primarily from taxation, regulations, forced unionism, and hostility to foreign direct investment. If people in Michigan are upset about losing automotive jobs, they should look to Lansing first. States with low taxes, low levels of regulation, and right-to-work that welcome investment no matter its source have been taking residents and economic activity from states that don’t, and Michigan has been on the losing end of that policy fight for decades.
Making Vance’s policy argument even more convoluted is that earlier in the same speech he bemoaned the fact that “the average new car costs nearly $50,000.” Requiring that more cars be manufactured in the United States, one of the world’s highest-wage countries, is not going to make them cheaper. Neither will tariffs, another policy Vance supported in the speech.
Then, Vance said, “Let’s talk about the news of the day. Just a few days ago, Stellantis announced that it was going to permanently cut nearly 2,500 proud Michigan autoworkers who make the iconic Ram 1500.” Indeed, Stellantis did make such an announcement. It’s the latest in a long line of layoffs at Big Three automakers since the new labor contract with the United Auto Workers was signed last year.
The UAW has pretty clearly misled workers by saying it was protecting their jobs as the mainstream media cheered on the six-week strike, only to have thousands of layoffs after the new labor agreement came into force. But Vance was on the UAW picket line with Democratic representative Marcy Kaptur at the time, joining in the misplaced enthusiasm. Since then, the UAW has endorsed Harris for president and is now pursuing lawfare against Vance’s running mate.
This “policy attack dog” has a lot more bark than bite.