America is producing as much manufactured goods as it ever has, with a lot fewer people. Even if the Trump administration is successful in bringing factories back to this country, it won’t be a jobs boom because such factories will be highly automated. From Wolf Richter at wolfstreet.com:
Robots are the Great Equalizer.
Apple will invest in and promote “advanced manufacturing” in the US, CEO Tim Cook told CNBC’s Jim Cramer on Wednesday after the somewhat uninspiring earnings report. It was one of the ways Apple would create jobs in America, he said. To do that, Apple would put $1 billion in a fund that would invest in “advanced manufacturing” companies.
Apple has already “created two million jobs in America,” he said in the interview. This includes 80,000 jobs at Apple in the US; plus jobs at US suppliers, such as Corning, which makes the glass for the iPhone and iPad, and 3M, which makes adhesives that Apple uses in its devices; plus the “developer community” of almost 1.5 million people who write apps that, as he said, “change the world.”
So to “get more people to do advanced manufacturing in the US,” he said, Apple is setting up a fund, “initially” putting in $1 billion. “We’re announcing it today,” he said. “We’ve talked to a company that we’re going to invest in already.”
This $1 billion would have to be “our US money which we have to borrow to get, which is another whole topic….” Most of Apple’s cash is registered overseas, the result of profits that have not been taxed in the US. Apple’s overseas cash can be and is already invested in the US, such as in Treasury securities, but it cannot be used for capital expenditures or share buybacks in the US without being “repatriated” under the US tax code and thus triggering an income-tax event.
That’s why “comprehensive tax reform is so important to this economy,” he said. Practically everyone agrees on that. Practically no one agrees on how to do it.
By promoting advanced manufacturing in the US, “we can be the ripple in the pond,” he said. “Because if we can create many manufacturing jobs, those manufacturing jobs create more jobs around them because you have a service industry that builds up around them.”
To continue reading: Manufacturing Might Come Back to the US, but Robots will Get the Jobs: Apple CEO
