(What’s Left of) Our Economy: No Delta Effect on U.S. Manufacturing Growth In Sight. Yet.

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aerospace, aircraft, aircraft parts, appliances, automotive, Boeing, CCP Virus, coronavirus, COVID 19, Delta variant, electrical components, electrical equipment, fabricated metal products, Fed, Federal Reserve, inflation-adjusted growth, inflation-adjusted output, machinery, manufacturing, medical supplies, medicines, personal protective equipment, petroleum and coal products, pharmaceuticals, plastics, PPE, real growth, recovery, reopening, rubber, textiles, vaccines, {What's Left of) Our Economy

The after-inflation U.S. manufacturing production data reported today by the Federal Reserve revealed plenty of newsy developments. But my choice for biggest is the finding that, in price-adjusted terms, domestic manufacturers’ output finally nosed back above its last pre-CCP Virus (February, 2020) level.

The new number isn’t an all-time high – that came in December, 2007, just as the financial crisis was about to plunge the entire U.S. economy into its worst non-pandemic-related downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s. As of this July, real manufacturing production is still 5.94 percent below that peak.

Measured in constant dollars, however, such output is now 1.15 percent greater than just before the virus arrived in the United States in force. Not much, and of course any Delta variant-prompted curbs on economic activity or extra caution in consumer behavior could wipe out this progress. But you know what they say about a journey of a thousand miles.

Had this milestone not been reached, I’d have led off this post by noting that although some really unusual seasonal factors in the volatile automotive sector definitely juiced the excellent July sequential output gain, U.S.-based industry outside automotive performed impressively during the month as well.

Specifically, as the Fed’s press release noted, the whopping 11.24 percent jump in the price-adjusted output of vehicles and parts contributed about half of overall manufacturing’s 1.39 percent growth. That automotive figure was the best monthly improvement since the 29.39 percent rocket ride the sector generated in July, 2020 – when the whole economy was staging its rebound from that spring’s deep but brief virus-induced recession. And that overall real on-month production advance was the best for manufacturing in general since the 3.39 percent achieved in March – earlier in the initial post-pandemic recovery.

But in July, the rest of domestic industry still expanded by a strong 0.70 percent after inflation – its best inflation-adjusted growth since the 3.31 percent also recorded in March.

The revisions in this morning’s Fed data for the entire manufacturing sector were mixed. June’s initially reported 0.05 percent decline is now judged to be a 0.10 percent increase, and April’s previously reported 0.39 percent drop now stands as a 0.21 percent decrease. But May’s last reported increase – upgraded slightly to a strong 0.92 percent – is now estimated at just 0.65 percent.

Looking at broad industry categories, the big real output July winners in domestic manufacturing’s ranks aside from automotive were electrical equipment, appliances, and components (up 2.31 percent); plastics and rubber products (up 2.02 percent); machinery (1.91 percent); the broad aerospace and miscellaneous transportation sector (think “Boeing”), which rose by 1.90 percent; textiles (up 1.67 percent); and miscellaneous durable goods, which includes but is hardly confined to many pandemic-related medical supplies (up 1.55 percent).

As I keep noting, good machinery growth is especially encouraging, since its goods are used both throughout manufacturing and the economy as a whole, and strong demand signals optimism among manufacturers about their future prospects – which tends to feed on itself and impart continued momentum to industry.

The list of significant losers was much shorter, with real fabricated metal products output 0.42 percent lower than June levels and petroleum and coal products shrinking by 0.60 percent.

Turning to narrower manufacturing categories that remain in the news, despite Boeing’s still serious manufacturing and safety problems, and ongoing CCP Virus-created weakness in air transport, inflation-adjusted production of aircraft and parts continued its strong recent run. June’s initially reported 5.24 percent monthly output surge was revised down to 3.57 percent. But that’s still excellent by any measure. And July saw production climb another 2.78 percent. As a result, real output in this sector is now 9.95 percent higher than it was just before the pandemic’s arrival in the United States in February, 2020.

Real output in the pharmaceuticals and medicines sector (which includes vaccines) grew by 0.77 percent sequentially in July, and its real output is now 11.35 percent greater than just before the pandemic. But those revisions!

June’s initially reported 0.89 percent increase is now judged to be a 0.34 percent decrease, and May’s previously downgraded 0.15 percent rise has now been upgraded all the way to 1.54 percent.

An even better July was registered by the vital medical equipment and supplies sector – which includes virus-fighting items like face masks, face masks, protective gowns, and ventilators. Monthly growth came in at 1.71 percent. But revisions here were puzzling, too.

June’s initially reported 0.99 percent sequential real production improvement is now seen as a major 1.54 percent falloff. And May’s monthly constant dollar growth, already upgraded from 0.19 percent to 1.18 percent, is now pegged at 1.86 percent.

I’m still optimistic about domestic manufacturing’s outlook, and that’s still based on domestic manufacturers’ own continued optimism – which as shown by the two major private sector monthly manufacturing surveys remained strong in July. (See here and here.)

But I also continue to view U.S. public health authorities’ judgment as suspect when it comes to the balance that needs to be struck between fighting the virus and keeping the economy satisfactorily open. So as long as new virus variants pose the threat of higher infection rates (though not at all necessarily of greater damage to Americans’ health), my own optimism has become more tempered.

Those Stubborn Facts: A Strange Definition of a Broken Trump Promise

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Associated Press, CCP Virus, coronavirus, COVID 19, health security, Mainstream Media, manufacturing, masks, medical supplies, PPE, supply chain, textiles, Those Stiubborn Facts, Trump, Wuhan virus

“Shortages of meltblown textiles, key to N95 mask-making, illustrate ‘the failure of this administration to take necessary steps to fulfill’ its promise of restoring critical manufacturing capacity lost to China.”

– Associated Press, September 10, 2020

“Pre-pandemic, five U.S. producers were making about 42 million N95 masks a month. By October, that is projected to have increased to 11 U.S. producers making 168 million a month, which could amount to 2 billion a year….”

–Associated Press, September 10, 2020

“Also pre-pandemic, 24 U.S. companies were making meltblown, with 79 machine lines in operation….But only a fraction of that was going into medical respirators….By the end of 2021… there will be 28 new lines in the U.S., representing a 35% increase, with almost all of the newly produced textile going into medical supplies.”

–Associated Press, September 10, 2020

(Source: “Scarcity of key material squeezes medical mask manufacturing, by Martha Mendoza, Juliet Linderman, Thomas Peipert, and Irena Hwang,” Associated Press, September 10, 2020, https://apnews.com/02a0542e8a05176bd5d79757134bc277)

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: How Pre-Trump Trade Policies Devastated U.S. Protective Gear Capacity

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apparel, CCP Virus, China, coronavirus, COVID 19, Fed, Federal Reserve, free trade, garments, health security, manufacturing, manufacturing capacity, NAFTA, non-durable goods, North American Free Trade Agreement, offshoring, textiles, Trade, Trump, World Trade Organization, WTO, Wuhan virus, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Recently I put up a post expressing gratitude that, despite their best efforts, pre-Trump U.S. trade policies didn’t manage to send the entire U.S. textile and apparel industries offshore. After all, companies in these sectors are the companies with the greatest expertise and capabilities in making all the personal protective equipment (PPE) crucial in the anti-CCP Virus fight.

Of course, the nation is therefore reliant for these and other medical products on countries, like China, which have responded to the emergency at various times with export bans. And in the case of pandemic-prone China, much production of all kinds was shut down temporarily because of the original virus outbreak.

Thanks to the release of the latest Federal Reserve industrial production data, it’s possible to quantify the damage done to these vital industries in ways other than the output figures I presented in that previous offering. That’s because the Fed’s monthly releases report in detail not only on increases or decreases in after-inflation output for manufacturing (and related) sectors. They also report the monthly changes in industrial capacity – the resources and facilities available to turn out various goods.

The results through last month are below. They use as baselines the month the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA – which has now been turned into the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement) went into effect, and the month that China entered the World Trade Organization (WTO). NAFTA’s January, 1994 onset signaled to many the transformation of U.S. trade policy into U.S. offshoring policy (see my book, The Race to the Bottom, for this argument). The January, 2002 beginning of China’s WTO membership gave the People’s Republic  overall, and its even-then-immense textile and especially apparel sectors, invaluable protection against American responses to its various forms of trade predation. (Limited safeguards versus “market-disrupting” surges in imports from China were written into the WTO agreement.)

For comparison’s sake, the industrial capacity changes for non-durable goods manufacturing (the super-sector into which textiles and apparel are grouped), and total manufacturing are provided as well:

                                                       Since NAFTA onset    Since China WTO entry

Textiles:                                              -37.05 percent              -44.05 percent

Apparel & leather goods:                   -81.97 percent              -77.18 percent

Non-durables manufacturing:           +17.06 percent                -2.23 percent

Total manufacturing:                         +75.54 percent             +10.78 percent

Clearly, the decimation of apparel capacity sticks out prominently. But although the more capital-intensive textiles industry didn’t suffer nearly as much, it fared much worse than either manufacturing in toto or the non-durables sectors overall. That’s largely because as the apparel industry disappeared, so did a prime domestic customer for textiles producers.

It’s also obvious for all these categories that although NAFTA was, to say the least, hardly a bonanza, the big trade-related damage was done by China’s WTO entry. Afterward that event has been when the shrinkage of textiles capacity accelerated, when the vast majority of the post-NAFTA apparel damage was done, when non-durables capacity gains shifted into reverse, and when total manufacturing capacity growth slowed to a crawl.

Calls are now abounding for remedies to the resulting shortages – like greater stockpiling and various tax and subsidy incentives for reshoring at least some of this production. But material in stockpiles can decay if unused too long, and companies would be foolish to spend heavily on new U.S. factories if they still face the likelihood of being subsidized and dumped out of existence by predatory foreign trade policies. As a result, there’s no substitute for stiff tariffs, and a credible national resolve to keep them in place, for ensuring that America’s health security never becomes so degraded again.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: When Industries Disappear

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apparel, big government, Breitbart.com, conservatves, embroidery, Frances Martel, Immigration, labor unions, manufacturing, New Jersey, skills, textiles, Union City, unions, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Until I read Frances Martel’s “Hanging by a Thread,” I used to think of Union City as little more than one of those bleak-looking smallish northern New Jersey municipalities the Amtrak trains pass through on their way between New York City and points south.  How wrong I was!  And for such wide-ranging policy and political reasons!  

Not that you can’t simply enjoy her long feature for Breitbart.com for the fascinating descriptions of what makes her hometown special geologically (e.g., it sits on lots of Manhattan bedrock-like granite, good for supporting factories with heavy machines and multistory housing) and demographically (because it developed fairly late in the 19^th century, its population was always dominated by immigrants).

Clearly important as well is Martel’s main theme – how manufacturing built solid prosperity for Union City from the get-go, and how its demise, due to developments like (but not restricted to) offshoring-obsessed U.S. trade policies helped bring punishingly hard times. (Full disclosure: Martel interviewed me for the article, and quoted me quite generously.)

But if you’re thinking this is only an article for trade and/or manufacturing mavens, or for New Jersey history aficionadoes, you’re sorely mistaken. For along the way, “Hanging by a Thread” offers important insights into how these closely related subjects profoundly affect many of the nation’s other major issues and challenges.

For example, Martel offers a novel twist on the notion that the United States welcomed so many immigrants so consistently (though not always) from the mid-19^th century onwards in particular because of its urgent need for unskilled labor. No doubt most of the newcomers were poorly educated. But as “Hanging” makes clear, industry during this period used lots of complicated machinery, including the embroidery sector that became concentrated in Union City.

As Union City’s official historian told Martel, many of its first immigrants came from Germany, Switzerland, Austria, and other parts of Europe with major textile industries, and brought with them extensive experience working with such devices that employers clearly found valuable.

Since skills (of different kinds, of course) remain so crucial to economic success today, Union City’s past raises the question of whether – as Open Borders advocates seem to believe – the United States today should indiscriminately welcome immigrants regardless of skill levels and gainful employability.

Two other messages coming through loud and clear from Martel’s research and analysis are especially important for conservatives to heed. The first has to do with unions. Martel’s parents were hard-line anti-communists who fled Castro’s Cuba, and her mother worked in apparel. The author explains that these arrangements were seen as “a critical part of the factory ecosystem.” The following exchange, with her mother speaking first, makes the point vividly:

“‘I have always had a good union. It works, I think. It works to have a union because without a union, in a private place, you’re screwed,’ she told me.

“‘You don’t feel that there is a conflict between that and being a capitalist?’” I asked…..

“‘No. What? Being a capitalist? No,’ she replied, with confusion. ‘No, that has nothing to do with socialism, it’s just so that the worker has someone to defend them. If you don’t have a job, they can fire you whenever. That’s not fair. To throw you out for no reason, it’s unfair ifyou are working well.’”

Martel’s second message for conservatives actually echoes a point I’ve made before (e.g., here): The more enthusiastically traditional free trade policies are pursued by American leaders, the bigger government’s going to get. But as Martel makes clear, these approaches to the global economy are bound to generate needs that far exceed the kinds of welfare state benefits (ranging from income support to heavily subsidized healthcare) used to keep living standards above third world levels (or at least try to do so).

As the Union City example shows, relentless globalization can also turbocharge government’s role in economic development itself. The author explains that, since 2000, Union City Mayor Bob Stack (a big-city machine politician if ever there was one)

“took the reins on the eve of the guillotine falling on embroidery and has taken to meticulously rebuilding the identity of the city. He tore down Roosevelt Stadium, the sports venue at the heart of the city, to build a new Union City High School – with a stadium on the roof. Union City previously boasted two high schools, one for Union Hill and one for West Hoboken, that Stack turned into middle schools. He built parks in honor of the city’s Cuban, Colombian, and Dominican populations, and an ‘International Park.’ Seemingly every other street has a water park open in the summer for children to play in – the biggest, Firefighters’ Memorial Park, boasts an Olympic-sized swimming pool. His administration also refurbished the downtown library into the Musto Cultural Center and built its replacement, the library at José Martí Middle School (which his administration also built), in the shadow of what was once St. Michael’s monastery, an imposing Catholic historic site that now houses a Korean Presbyterian congregation.”

In other words, Union City realistically recognized the choices before it, and rejected “the option much of the Rust Belt took: do nothing, abandon ship, hope the invisible hand swoops in before you hit the concrete.” As a result (and also because of its proximity to New York City), it’s more than avoided the ghost town fates of counterparts like Gary, Indiana, Youngstown, Ohio, and Detroit, Michigan.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: A Big New Hit to Free Trade Theory

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Adam Smith, Bruce R. Scott, comparative advantage, David Ricardo, economics, economists, factors of production, free trade, Great Britain, machinery, manufacturing, Portugal, protectionism, Ralph E. Gomory, Steve Keen, technology, textiles, The Wealth of Nations, Trade, William J. Baumol, wine, {What's Left of) Our Economy

OK, time for some good news – at least if you’d like the economics community to come up with more realistic views of trade policy and its impact on the national and global economy. As made clearest by a (sadly overlooked) journal article by Steve Keen of Kingston University in London, some noted academic economists have identified fatal-looking flaws in comparative advantage theory – the 18^th century concept that ever since has anchored mainstream scholarly thinking about the entire discipline, along with justifying the virtues of the freest possible trade flows.

As Keen writes, comparative advantage identified benefits flowing from economic specialization, and was first advanced by British economist Adam Smith in his seminal The Wealth of Nations to explain the superiority of laissez-faire, free market practices within industries. His compatriot David Ricardo extended the concept to relationships between industries and countries. The core idea in its trade theory version is that all countries and their peoples will reap maximum gains if they limit themselves to those tasks that represent their own best efforts – even if they’re laggards by international standards in that particular sector.

I first encountered a compelling objection to comparative advantage in the early 1990s, in the form of a sharp observation by Harvard Business School professor Bruce R. Scott. As he noted, Portugal, one of two countries in Ricardo’s classic description of comparative advantage’s virtues, basically hewed to the Ricardian prescription, specialized in turning out relatively simple products (in this case, wine) – and remained a poor country for centuries. The second country was Great Britain. It specialized in higher value goods (epitomized, in that era, by textiles), and became the world’s greatest and richest empire.

More fundamentally, Portugal specialized in activity that could generate good levels of growth in the short-term, but whose long-term wealth creation potential was limited by low levels of productivity growth, capital and technology intensiveness, by limited potential for innovation, and by deficiencies in other closely related indicators of dynamism. Great Britain specialized in activity whose positive spinoffs were bound to be far greater.

Other major Ricardo blind spots have been pointed out since then – for example, his skepticism that capital would ever easily move across borders. But his central insights have continued commanding pervasive respect among professional economists. Just as important, they’re still revered by political leaders and opinion molders who find these theories convenient for portraying their often self-interested trade policy preferences as indisputable truths, or who learned in a freshman economics class that they’re gospel.

Keen’s big addition to comparative advantage critiques has to do with unfettered free trade’s likely effect on an economy’s diversity and growth potential. As he notes, Ricardo’s case for liberalizing trade flows hinges on a completely unrealistic assumption about its impact on a national productive base, and hence on national output and incomes. The assumption: that countries will wind up better on net if they abandon those activities that don’t meet the comparative advantage test, and refocus their efforts on activities that can pass it, and that such a transition is feasible in the first place.

In other words, Portugal would scrap all of its textile factories (and presumably all its other industries as well), and become for all intents and purposes a mono-economy devoted to wine. Great Britain would abandon whatever wine-making and other non-textile work it was engaged in, and turn into a big cloth-making facility. What of the other necessities of national and individual life, at least those that are in theory trade-able? They would be imported – and paid for by the earnings from exports of the national champions.

Simply articulating this scenario reveals how completely fanciful it is. For example, what about supplying needs before the envisioned transitions are completed? How long will they last? And even over decades under a free trade regime, could the global economy possibly be expected to turn into the kind of exquisitely complex but perfectly functioning mechanism that could enable a large number of mono-economies from securing the full range of traded goods and services that are either needed or simply wanted?

Keen, however, identifies what he reasonably seems to view as a more fundamental problem: The sectors of the economy in which Ricardians want countries to specialize are relatively strong because they efficiently use various factors of production (chiefly, according to Keen, machinery). The Ricardian transition entails other parts of the economy switching to that strong sector (again, wine-making and textile-making in Portugal and Great Britain, respectively), and essentially becoming just as good as wine-making – largely because all the kinds of machinery used in that economy can easily, and indeed seamlessly be redeployed in the strong sector.

If this assumption was valid, as Keen observes, then it would be reasonable to suppose that each rejiggered national economy could produce even more output, and generate higher incomes for its population, than before. But as the author also observes, this outcome makes no sense because “machinery is specific to each industry, and the crucial machines in one industry cannot simply ‘move’ to another without loss of productivity.” And if you believe, as is the case with mainstream economics, that rising productivity is a key – and over the long run, the biggest key – to rising incomes, then you should recognize this Ricardian transition also as a recipe for worsening national impoverishment.

That is, in the kind of mono-economy Ricardo hoped would eventually comprise the global economy, most of the populace would be struggling with inappropriate capital stock and other assets to earn a living engaged in activity with which it boasted little, if any, experience.

Why did Ricardo overlook something so obvious? In Keen’s words, it’s an example of “a confusion of monetary capital (which Ricardo, as a stockbroker by trade, knew intimately) with the physical machinery in factories (about which he knew very little). Yes, monetary capital moves easily in search of a profit—today, even internationally. But machinery is specific to each industry….”

However, Keen continues, “The archetypal machines for cloth and wine manufacturing in Ricardo’s time included the spinning jenny and the wine press. It is stating the obvious that one cannot be turned into the other, but stating the obvious is necessary, because the easy conversion of one into the other was assumed by Ricardo, and has been assumed ever since by mainstream economic theory.”

Here’s another example of the same delusionality that will be familiar to everyone who’s followed the U.S. trade policy debate for the last few decades: the claim by supporters of current trade policies that trade-related production and job losses are no big deal because America’s real edge in the global economy going forward is, say, services. So the best response is to train all those displaced auto workers to become nurses (and, pace Keen, to use all that surplus auto production machinery to write software).

Just as interesting, Keen points to a small but growing body of research touting the advantages of industrial and other economic diversity – the opposite of Ricardo’s aim. A broad-based manufacturing and technology base has of course long been supported by critics of current trade policies for national security reasons (to ensure the ability to produce an adequate range of defense assets), and to avoid potentially dangerous dependence on foreign supplies of civilian goods as well.

Similarly, it’s been contended that too many linkages exist among manufacturing industries, and between manufacturing and many kinds of services, to assume that entire sectors can be lost without major collateral damage.

Keen’s piece, however, also spotlights evidence that the world’s least successful national economies tend to possess narrow – at best – productive bases and to generate a comparably narrow range of exports, and that the most successful turn out a wide variety of goods for both domestic and foreign markets.

Keen’s theoretical critique of Ricardo is by no means the only one that’s come from the ranks of economists themselves. In 2001, William J. Baumol (a former President of the American Economic Association no less) and Ralph E. Gomory, one of the nation’s leading technology authorities, produced this study purporting to show that explicitly promoting national industries and technologies via various forms of government intervention (including tariffs) can produce better results for individual countries that toeing the free trade line.

But the Baumol-Gomory case has (so far) failed to dent confidence in Ricardian trade theory notably. And certainly the Mainstream Media never displayed much interest. In that vein, of possible import is the appearance this week on Bloomberg.com of this follow-up of sorts to Keen-like analysis. More steps on a  journey of a thousand miles?

Im-Politic: The Media’s Anti-Trump Trade and Immigration Canards

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2016 elections, apparel, China, CNN, Donald Trump, E-Verify, illegal immigrants, Im-Politic, Immigration, imports, Jake Tapper, Jeb Bush, Mainstream Media, manufacturing, Marco Rubio, Milliken & Co., North American Free Trade Agreement, offshoring, textile machinery, textiles, Trade, Washington Post

I don’t want RealityChek to turn into Donald Trump Defense HQ, but media coverage of the tycoon-turned-GOP-presidential-candidate remains such a transparent exercise in (ignorant) sliming, and so much of the mudslinging focuses on his trade and immigration policy positions, that I’ve got to return to the subject yet again.

This past week, countless pundits and reporters (and their editors) clearly have decided that they can at least slow Trump’s surge in the polls by portraying him as an economic hypocrite. Hence the burst of columns and stories slamming the candidate as a trade protectionist whose signature apparel products are made in China, and as an immigration xenophobe and racist whose construction projects employ illegal aliens. What they really show are classic examples of, in effect, blaming the victim. Here’s what I mean.

I first ran into this tactic in the early 1990s, shortly after starting to concentrate on trade policy issues upon being hired by the Economic Strategy Institute. One of ESI’s original corporate donors was Milliken & Co., a huge textiles manufacturer. And as its activities in supporting organizations critical of U.S. trade policy started to attract coverage, news articles and material from various hired guns of the nation’s offshoring lobby invariably mentioned that, although Milliken enthusiastically backed restrictions on imports that competed with its own products, it had no qualms using foreign-made textile production machinery in its factories. Obvious hypocrisy, right?

When I checked with the firm’s Washington, D.C. staff, though, I got an answer that somehow the critics never mentioned: The same American approach to trade that was threatening the textile industry had also destroyed domestic textile production machinery making. The main reason? These U.S. policies failed to recognize that foreign rivals were just as determined to monopolize global textile machinery manufacturing at America’s expense – through subsidies, dumping, and other forms of economic predation – as they were to monopolize the production of fabric itself via the same tactics. As a result, any U.S. company that wanted to continue turning out textiles and related products had little choice but to use imported production equipment.  I’m still waiting for the Mainstream Media to acknowledge its oversight.

Donald Trump faces the same kind of problem. At some point recently, he decided that selling men’s business clothing and accessories could be a good money-maker. But when he looked for manufacturers, he discovered that most of the American apparel business had been displaced by imports. Just to give an idea of how great the damage has been, since the current phase of American trade policy began at the start of 1994 with the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement, U.S. garment production is down by nearly 78 percent in real terms. In many individual segments of this industry, losses have been much greater. For example, from 2005 through 2013 alone, American men’s neckwear output sank from a paltry $362.39 million to $127.38 million – a nosedive of nearly 55 percent.  (These figures are calculated from the databases of the Federal Reserve’s industrial production reports and the Census Bureau’s Annual Survey of Manufactures, respectively.)  

But none of this was apparently known to CNN’s Jake Tapper, to cite just one example. He plainly thought he had engineered a Pulitzer-worthy “gotcha” moment when, during an interview with Trump, he revealed that he was wearing a Trump brand tie that was made in China. Responding to the anchor’s accusation of hypocrisy, the candidate responded, “I say my ties, many times, are made in China, not all of them by the way, but a lot of them are made in China, because they’ve manipulated their currency to such a point that it’s impossible for our companies to compete with them. When it comes to outsourcing jobs, which is what this tie would be a representative issue of, one of the issues is that the people in China, the laborers, are paid a lot less, and the standards are worse when it comes to the environment and healthcare, and worker safety.”

And Tapper’s comeback after being schooled in the unmistakable macro-realities of doing business globally? An anecdote: “American Apparel makes stuff here–.”

But what about Trump’s use of illegal immigrant laborers to build his fancy apartment towers and resorts? The Washington Post clearly thought it had spotted another example of Trump fakery when it reported that “a Trump company may be relying on some undocumented workers to finish” a big D.C. hotel project. To his credit, correspondent Antonio Olivo gave Trump’s spokespeople ample opportunity to make the point that, as has become the norm in the construction business, big firms use independent contractors to supply laborers, and that it’s these companies’ responsibility to ensure that they’re properly documented. What was less clear – and this is the fault of Trump’s staff – is that very effective counterfeiting of the needed documents is commonplace, and that even the largest contractors aren’t able to verify them adequately, especially when labor needs to be supplied ASAP.

What the Post should have added, however, is that for more than a decade, the nation has had available a highly effective system for fighting phony residence papers – E-Verify. The good news: Even detractors admit that the internet-based system “catches 4.5 undocumented workers for every one U.S. worker wrongly identified.” The bad news: its use is still largely voluntary.

I haven’t been able to find a Trump statement of support for mandating E-Verify’s use, but is it remotely plausible that he’d oppose it? Doubtful, especially since such immigration enthusiasts like his rivals Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio have praised the program – despite failing to say explicitly that they’d expand it to cover all employers.

Unquestionably, Trump’s campaign can be legitimately criticized on any number of grounds, and his trade and immigration positions are eminently debatable, too. But in almost entirely concentrating their attacks on Trump in uninformed trade and immigration-related cheap shots, the Mainstream Media is revealing much more about its own pro-establishment, anti-Main Street biases than about its target.