regard to secondary education and k-12. the boss hasn't really done a lot for teachers, and as a teacher i've seen it. for me education is number one and that's why i'm voting. >> voices from the road on c-span. >> scott paul is back at her desk he serves as president of the alliance for american manufacturing. coming off the most recent jobs report about how many manufacturing jobs are there in the u.s.? it which where the trending? >> there are just shy of 13 million manufacturing jobs in the united states. the trends, since the end of the great recession, so dating back to the early days of the obama administration, has been incredibly positive. steady. the trend over the last year has been a little less rosy. we have added only about

206,000 manufacturing jobs over all of the last 12 inmonths. and this is in a private sector economy that has added about 2 million jobs over the same period. so you see that's lagged far behind the rest of the economy. there is about a one and a half year boom during the trump administration, but that has dissipated. in over the past few months in particular we have been losing manufacturing jobs. what do you point to for that leg? that's a great question and there seems to be a couple of trends. there has been some uncertainty that has come around as a result of the trade i policy. i think the trade policy has had some benefits but has also added some uncertainties to businesses. they are reluctant to invest and that means and other things are not getting purchasedur and it has a spiral effect in manufacturing. you have seen an oil and gas, ironically when the prices for oil and gas go down a little

bit, that means there is probably reduced employment in the refining and other sectors which are reduced opportunities. you've seen a bit of that as well. what has happened with respect to boeing and the 737 max, has had some impact in the aerospace supply chain. when you combine all those factors, it hasss contributed to a bit of weakness. then you have overarching factors like the continued strength of the dollar. people probably say what does that have to do with manufacturing at all? if the dollar is what we call overvalued, it's a lot harder .for us to sell our exports into other markets. they are artificially expensive and it makes imports coming into this market cheaper. so it displaces some domestic production as well. that is been a continued trend in manufacturing. there has been a drag on the

ability to create manufacturing jobs. >> appeals skip monomers out for the viewers to have questions or comments for scott paul. special phone line and the segment 2,027,488,000. if you work in manufacturing we would love to hear from you. all others (202)748-8001. as folks are calling and you mention 13 million manufacturing jobs in the u.s. what are the subsectors, the biggest subsectors and is very broad category of manufacturing? >> that's a great question and anyha fracturing is many things a lot of people would have an image ofho a large auto factory. and certainly there are some of those and when you couple automobiles and auto parts together, that accounts for about one in every night manufacturing jobs. it's very expensive supply chain. that manufacturing is also things like the folks making craft beers. that is manufacturing you have seen that sector rise up it's a small percentage of manufacturing employment. but you will have shops like that all around the country they're doing that.

the primary manufacturing categories are what are called durable goods versus nondurable goods. durable goods are the things like automobiles, planes, washing machines, what someone buys or some company buys that you will hang onto for a long time. nondurable goods are things like processed foods. food that is had some value added to it, that's a manufacturing process. and so that is considered ae nondurable good. nondurable goods aren't as subject to this business uncertainty or what have you because people have to eat. people have to buy a lot of these consumer staples. that employment tends to be a little bit more steady. the durable goods is where you see it going up and downn words really whip/by international trade and exchange rates and a lot of things happening around the world. public health crisis, the coronavirus that it will certainly have an impact. you see the durable goods sector probably more subject

to any headwinds that you are going to see in the global economy. >> we noted you have been on the "washington journal" before, but for those that haven't seen what is the alliance? >> theha lines for american manufacturing has been around since 2007. we are alw partnership between the united states work is union which is united's largest industrial unit and they represent workers in everything from steel to making sponges and chemicals, on paper, and tires, and some of the steelworkers employers. so we have business partners as wellin steel and other sectors. a lot of times people probably say wellla labor and business fight with each other all the time. whether it's about contracts and issues, and there are certainlybu disagreements at the table. but we have found that among the steelworkers in the business partners i there's a lot of commonality on issues like the need to invest in infrastructure, the need to invest in skills and training. the need to have a trade

policy that's looking out for our domestic concerns. and then the value of manufacturing overall to the and explain that to people, we have been proud to do that work for 13 years now. >> and its america manufacturing.org if you want to check them out online or on twitter. keep it made in the usa. if you want to follow along in the best part is when you come on you get to chat with folks in the manufacturing industry. this is gene out of jackson, michigan in the manufacturing sector. >> this economy was going to go from the manufacturing to service economy. this started in the 50s under eisenhower. then and the 60s, they told us they are getting rid of the dirty jobs and the repetitive jobs to go to a service economy where we would have more leisure time and more money. but all we got was more

leisure time. speedy one i will let scott paul jump in on that what is your job? >> caller: i retired from this deal mill and worked there 205 years. >> host: thanks for calling in scott paul? >> guest: i think jean raises an important point. i think a lot of people look back on manufacturing and think of the best days are behind it. certainly in the 1950s manufacturing accounted for about half of our economy. it was an extraordinary amount of employment and of economic output. manufacturing did protas the middle-class jobs which allowed people to have disposable income and then they bought things like services. they went to the movies, they took vacations, and that help strengthen the service economy. so it's a bit of a virtuous cycle. we have also seen i think this is the important thing so i think that'soo all good a good

evolution for the american economy. i think what's not been so good has been the fact that we have seen manufacturing get eroded in part by the global competition. we have seen other countries that have tried to mimic the united states manufacturing success, except they have done that with a very heavy hand. that has certainly eroded our global market share of manufacturing and our ability to export. so that's the part of manufacturing that has declined as a percentage of our economy that has me trouble. and i would just note that in the last quarter of 2019, manufacturing, as a percentage of our gdp was 11%. that's the lowest it has been since early in the 1930s. it has never been lower than that. >> host: tampa florida or here's john good morning. >> caller: thank you both fears service we really

appreciate it. the single greatest threat is china's rise to power where u.s.ci leadership in business basically facilitated by the democratic party, initially the republicans. centralist democrats are all for off shoring jobs. bill clinton started to rise as rise to power signing off on nafta giving them the trading status to iw t0. we basically have trillions and trillions of dollars of infrastructure, plus trillions of dollars of money that will be in the federal government coffers, plus trillions of dollars of money that will be in the middle classes pocket that is now in china. >> host: so how do you feel about the trade deal that president trump side with china? c >> caller: it is certainly a hundred 80-degree change from the last three presidents that we had. bill clinton, w bush, other republicans and obama. the centrist democrats of the same thing as a pre-reform republicans. they are in the pocket of big business and of course. the trade deal is a step in the

right direction. it is the best the president could do considering the corruption thatt has been an hour very political infrastructure, if you will, since bill clinton took office. >> host: what you specifically like about it? >> caller: what i like about it is he's trying to attempt to reverse the trade deficit. tethat's the reason the president and now i understand patriotically decided to run for president as opposed to the comfortable life he would've had before. because he saw the great need icbecause of the massive trade deficit was his number one motivation for running for president. that is the biggest single threat to america, china's rise to power and the free-trade starting with bill clinton. trish: got your point john. >> guest: i will say i grew john's idea on china's threat to our economy and our security. i think it has been underestimated for far too long. i am a bit less partisan about

assigning blame. when you take many steps back, you look at richard nixon made the first steps to open with china. i think in the aftermath of the tiananmen square massacre, george herbert walker bush did not do enough to push back on china. i do agree with john on his assessments of clinton, of george w. bush, and obama on china. i think they counted on dialogue and trying to bring china into the community of nations as as way to respond to that threat. i think it is abundantly clear that did not work. that china was gonna do what china was gonna do. while we are a country that believes in rules based trade and other mechanisms, it is not necessarily that way in china. we've got it wrong for a very long: time. >> host: how involved is your group with the creation or negotiation, discussions the white house had leading up to this try to trade up?

>> guest: from the early stages is an even during the campaign we told all of the candidates back in 2016, here's the challenges with china here are some possible ways to respond to t it. we did find that president trump and his team were very agreeable in terms of being aggressive to take action. we have seen that in a number of respects. the mechanisms they are using right now, the tariffs and the phase one china deal, are a step in that process. i think there are some advantages to them, i also think this phase one deal falls really short. because it deals with a few of the less tricky issues that are designed to help businesses -- american businesses who are doing business in china. it will help them a little bit. it boosts some sales of exports, if it is fully implemented and we have not seen any implementation

whatsoever so far. if it is implemented it should export boosts of agricultural products, energy products, maybe manufacturing products. that alone will undo some of the damage that was done because of china's retaliation against our additional tariffs against china. we are getting ourselves up to a point, but what's not being addressed and where i think the deal fell short, is that there are still massive intervention by the chinese government in thehe economy. it's businesses receive hundreds of billions of subsidies from the chinese government in fact about 3% of chinese gdp goes into subsidizing it's businesses that are owned by these chinese government. they don't have the private sector equivalent of a boeing -- make us all owned by the chinese government. the problem is, as skilled as our workers may be, as ingenious as our entrepreneurs, as efficient as our businesses managers may be, even that, if you are

competing against a lot of cash in another government, it's incredibly difficult to do that. and that is what a lot of our manufacturers have found. >> host: from alabama this is michael. good morning. my glory with this? i hear you by your phone michael doing overtime? >> caller: yes. >> host: go ahead. >> caller: hello in response to the other fellow that was on before, actually george herbert walkerta bush tried to push through nafta but couldn't get it through a democraticic congress. he ranan a lackluster campaign guaranteeing clinton wouldei win. this is from what i understand kind of worked out. his campaign manager had gone to arkansas and told bill clinton that he was going to be the fair-haired golden boy

provided he did not screw up. first thing clinton did was he pushed through the same bill that george herbertld walker bush pushed through speedy one let's go to nafta now the usmc a. >> guest: again i think here we have a case that i think for a long time both the establishment, i will call it and i do think it was kinda bipartisan but it's hisgo foreign policy establishment got it wrong. that included both democrats and republicans. the idea for a nafta was hatched in the reagan administration. george herbert walker bush, largely negotiated it. bill clinton added a few bells and whistles, i will say and then submitted it for implementation to the congress. it was passed in 1993 enacted in 1994. what we saw was a massive amount of movement,

particularly in the auto parts sector of production from the united states toxi mexico. what we didn't see was a nafta building up a mexican middle-class, which was the idea. like if we have more trade, their workers will get wealthier and will buy more of our products. it turned out to be a completely an adequate way to do that. i will say again that i think donald trump was right to new renegotiate the nafta and the usmc a, which is not entered into force, it has been passed by the united states, we've done everything we need to do but it still needs tout be passed in canada to take effect. it's not going to solve all of the problems. it will, i think, make some progress. i think it will we were talking about rules with china before, i think a lot of it depends on how the countries played by the rules that are laid out. they can make some modest improvements. my hope is at the end of the day, it will actually stop the

flood of jobs from leaving the united states to mexico based on low wages. and it will level out that playing field a little bit. i don't see it, i heard the trump administration folks talk about it over the last few days. i don't see this as being a massive boost for gdp in the united states. it might have a modest pot of positive effects, but i don't think it will be any sort of massive gdp boost to the united states. it makes modest improvements to theor rules, i think it was worth passing, we support it. i'm glad it passed, but it is nothing i would call as being a permanent transformational fix in trade policy. >> guest: another one of thoseo folks worked in the manufacture's yolanda out of newport news, virginia. you are almost got paul. >> caller: how are you doing today can hearr me? >> host: go ahead. >> caller: my thing is i work

in newport news for continental. we found out today our warehouse is shutting down, giving us three years and shipping to china. they will shut the warehouse down in south carolina. we are losing a lot of jobs here.in they are moving our buildings over to china. imagine 250 of us and newport news and this one warehouse. we are going to flood at employment. imagine be starting over again trying to find anotherga. job. we have to do something to keep these jobs here. >> host: yolanda thank. you for the call and sharing your story. >> guest: yolanda first of all, i am very sorry, having a plant closure like that is a devastating blow. there is no sugarcoating its. my hope is that the local officials will be doing everythinghi possible to help with readjustment.

i will acknowledge that it is incredibly difficult to do that successfully. w what we have seen in manufacturing, as those plants closed, like yolanda was referring to, is that instead of workers particularly older workers, those in their 40s or 50s, instead of them getting better jobs, what often happens is they get jobs that pay far less, or have fewer benefits, i did many cases they are not employed ever again. there has been really good evidence that has emerged over the lastt few years that these kinds of plant closures have ripple effectser that affect everybody in the community. they affect the public services, they have even affected the divorce rates unfortunately, they have led to a whole lot of really dire social consequences.

that is why when i am talking to our policymakers in washington, i always say we want to avert these plant closures in any way possible. we should probably raise the costs of what it takes for a company to close a plant. because there are a lots of costs that that company then does not have tohe bear that the rest of us do. trade policy does get at a little bit of it by helping to level the playing field. but we also have to impacts corporate behavior, the way in which we respond to these types of plant closures, and layoffs, and also the types of skills, training opportunities that we have in place for workers. because even in an economy where we have exceptionally low unemployment, that doesn't

mean that the jobs available are good ones or ones that will be a right fit for everybody. we need to do a much better job at issues like that. >> host: to give a little more context to yolanda story, this is the associated press story on continental's closings and losses announced back in september. the germans auto supply said last year that up to 20000 jobs worldwide would be affected over the next decade by restructuring program including 740 jobs at the newport news facility. the company said that as many as 20000 to over 204,000 jobs will be affected by the end of 20203. plants down on bland boulevard in newport news is what yolanda was referring to. this is sheila in virginia, good morning. >> caller: good morning, i

normally purchase everything american-made. recently, my dryer broke. i go to the appliance store to buy and american-made products. this election is nothing, one product made in america. hello? every time we send our manufacturing to another country, that gives us our american-made choice with less products to purchase. i grew up in new england where the industrial revolution started. i watched during the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, the textile manufacturing leave. the shoe companies leave. we have all those factories now in massachusetts as museums. museums. we could have people actually working and they turn them into museums. send the products to another country, we end up paying more, i don't shop at walmart

because 90% of the staff is not american-made. where are the american-made choices? be too sheila has raised a number of important points. i do think sheila is not alone, there are a lot of americans if given up preference will buy and american-made products. it's also true that they are incredibly hard to find edsometimes. she referenced a walmart. if youou are shopping for clothes and you are trying to find something that's american-made in your shopping at a big-box store, good luck. it's going to be incrediblye difficult. well over 90% of our clothing and apparel is imported. you have to search the internet, you have to go all over theto place to try to find these american-made products. they are scarce i think for a couple of reasons. one, is obviously that there were trade deals that made it possible to bring these importance in duty-free.

so that's what you see. number two, corporate behavior here. the corporations figured out they could sell the product for the same price, but make it cheaper overseas and bring it in. there were no other consequences for. they did it, so unless you incentivize corporations or punish them if they not do the right thing, you are going to consent tenured to see that. one thing that theoretically all the straight opening did was bring lower consumer prices and for the american people. again, there is cancer evidence that that has been thes case. youir have a lot of options to buy t-shirts, but when you look at things like footwear and what have you, most of the cost of that is not the production, it's the branding. it's the value of nike's brand or any other iconic brand or brand name you are paying for your not actually paying for the physical products all that much.

there is a lot to unpack there, but there's not an easy policye solution. it's going to take a thread of sophisticated policies to get it done. and then we are not even talking about electronics, the phones that you use in ius, no one has an american-made smartphone because they don't exist. >> host: before you join us this morning we spent an hour talking to our viewers about the tweet dispute between former president obama and president trump about who should get credit for the economy right now. in his response, one of the things that president trump pointed to as thes reason why he should get credit, is that regulations are way down is what he said. how have regulations and deregulation impacted the manufacturing sector? >> guest: that's a very good question. the answer is not every regulation is bad, not every d regulation is necessarily a good thing. because sometimes regulation provide certainty and builds up a market forng something.

but when you look at the evidence, what the trump done, isation has certainly they have slowed the flow of new regulation. that is something that they have done. have a undone a lot of regulations? they haven't. they have undone some, but has not been anything as breathtaking as what the president would want you to believe. when you look at regulatory costs overall, as a factor of manufacturing production, and some industries it is far more significant than others. i will goer back to the earlier conversation that we had, the much bigger impact that you see in manufacturing today our exchange rates, are the level playing field where we have the same opportunities to sell

products abroad as folks do coming into the country, the skills of the workforce, how efficient we are, what kind of incentives there are to invest in the modernization of the plants. and when you add all of that -- and also energy cost, our energy costs are pretty low and the united states compared to most of our competitors overseas. when you added o up, there are some things on our balance sheet that favor manufacturing, we have a few of the others that don't. regulation sometimes can tip the scale one way or the other and we don't want to go into an extreme either way. i don't think it is accurate for trump to say that his d regulatory has led to an unleashing of american manufacturing. >> host: do you care to weigh in on who should take credit? >> guest: political economics are always very dangerous because they do not account for other stuff going on. this isto a little bit troubling to me is are you really going

toea assign obama blame for the great recession that he inherited? because if you do, that means that manufacturing performancenc under obama was not great. and they lost jobs. but if youif look at it from their response to it and how manufacturing unfolded after that, it paints a much different picture. you look at th the longest expanse in manufacturing jobs are probably three or four decades that occurred in the obama administration. and trump had the good in fortune to inherit that. i think both presidents set up some positive things to help manufacturing. i look back at the obama administration and the amount of emphasis they put on innovation and vesting and advanced manufacturing and starting the conversation again about skills training and apprenticeships.

i think that made an enormous difference. along with rescuing the auto industry. at first some lost jobs becauset plants clothes but they helped it to rebound. and no one thought it would be possible for the auto industry to look like it did just a couple of years ago. it looks like it wasas on teetering on bankruptcy. now the trump administration has also done some positive things for manufacturing as well. and i think leveled the playing field with china will ultimately be a very good thing if they follow through on that. you can't account for public health emergencies and other things going on in the world. it's very difficult to do that. both presidentsrm deserve some credit for the performance of manufacturing, there are some things they could've done better. >> guest: does the alliance endorse residential elections. >> guest: we do not. we have had forms in the past. butar we are scrupulously

nonpartisan and participated with both white houses and bothth parties in the congress in helping to develop manufacturing jobs. >> guest: dave works in the manufacturing industry from e ohio. good morning you are on the scott paul. >> caller: well top of the morning to you. i i have a few inconvenient facts. one is the corporate debt has increased by 50% since 2008 to $10 trillion. a record 47% of our gdp. two, consumer debt is at $14 trillion, which is a record amounts. the average american owes $6194 at 16.88% interest rate. the national debt that we have had for this year in 2019 is $1 trillion. it is projected in 2020 to be

over $1 trillion. and the other things that basically come up is the industrial production has dropped for the third straight month. and in my industry, the projection is for this year that 7.4% will be decreased on aerospace and transportation. boeing has suspended the manufacturing of the 737. i do not see a rosy picture for american manufacturing sir. >> host: is that your industry aerospace? >> caller: yes, i am a purchasing manager for a landing gear is made for boeing, lockheed, brahmins, that's my job. b1 thanks for the job. >> guest: i think dave points out some data that would be of concern to any economist or person watching the economy which is the accumulation of debt. i think it is important to

note that our debt load has been transformed somewhat. it used to be a lot of housing debt, and that was very evident in the build up to the great recession. it was structured a little bit differently right now. i think that ought to be a concern clearly. dave's point directly about manufacturing the forecast is an important one. i do think if you look at some other data, i have a mix of you going forward. i do think there are some things that we can feel pretty good about. inventory buildup in manufacturings has started to wane a little bit, which is a good thing. that means folks to have to be making more purchases. i am certainly concerned about the impact that the public health emergency in china is going to have both on supply

and demand. it is going to point out a lot of vulnerabilities we have in our own supply chain, like with medicine for example which will be very shocking to the american people. there are some mixed signals there. a lot of it will depend on which direction the fed thanks we are moving. i am not a fed watcher and i will not make a prediction on that. but particularly in aerospace, yes, boeing plays an outsized role in that. if there's not a solution moving forward on the max, that clearly will have an impact in the aerospace industry. >> host: the caller gives aon chance to bring up the u.s. clock. the current national debt is 203 trillion and countingut that works out to about $70719.

citizen of the united states. that's going to get with scott paul this morning we always appreciate your time, please do come back and join us. she met john thank you.