\u201cIf you go back to the Trump presidency, we had 12,000 factories that were built during Donald Trump\u2019s presidency.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2014 Republican vice-presidential nominee JD Vance, in remarks on NBC\u2019s \u201cMeet the Press,\u201d Aug. 25<\/p>\n
Vance, in defending former president Donald Trump\u2019s proposal for across-the-board tariffs, argued that Trump managed to bring back manufacturing jobs from overseas when he was president. He then cited as evidence a statistic that immediately gave us PTSD.<\/p>\n
\u201c12,000 factories\u201d \u2014 we\u2019d fact-checked this falsehood during the Trump administration. Trump said it 15 times during his presidency, according to our database of false and misleading claims, including in the 2020 State of the Union address. He began making this claim after reports that, before the covid pandemic, the manufacturing sector was entering a recession.<\/p>\n
But this is an especially bogus figure.<\/p>\n
\u201cFactories\u201d conjures up images of smokestacks and production lines, but the dataset cited by Trump \u2014 and now Vance \u2014 is not really about factories. Trump is citing a Bureau of Labor Statistics database set known as the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, which counts the number of \u201cestablishments in private manufacturing.\u201d<\/p>\n
But more than 80 percent of these \u201cmanufacturing establishments\u201d employ five or fewer people. If those sound like pretty small factories, that\u2019s because many are not \u201cfactories.\u201d The BLS considers any establishment \u201cengaged in the mechanical, physical, or chemical transformation of materials, substances, or components into new products.\u201d So that also means establishments \u201cthat transform materials or substances into new products by hand or in the worker\u2019s home and those engaged in selling to the general public products made on the same premises from which they are sold, such as bakeries, candy stores, and custom tailors.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s also strange that Vance would rely on an outdated Trump statistic. As we mentioned, Trump included this in the 2020 State of the Union address, and it represented the period from the first quarter of 2017 to the third quarter of 2019.<\/p>\n
For all of Trump\u2019s presidency, the figure would be nearly 18,000 additional \u201cmanufacturing establishments.\u201d But here\u2019s the rub: Through the first quarter of this year, President Joe Biden could claim a gain of nearly 39,000 during his tenure.<\/p>\n
A Vance spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n
It says something about the quality of Trump campaign research that Vance would need to reach back to an outdated claim debunked four years ago. These aren\u2019t really factories \u2014 and Trump\u2019s record on this statistic fares poorly compared with Biden\u2019s.<\/p>\n
Vance earns Four Pinocchios.<\/p>\n
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\u201cIf you go back to the Trump presidency, we had 12,000 factories that were built during Donald Trump\u2019s presidency.\u201d \u2014 Republican vice-presidential nominee JD Vance, in remarks on NBC\u2019s \u201cMeet the Press,\u201d Aug. 25 Vance, in defending former president Donald Trump\u2019s proposal for across-the-board tariffs, argued that Trump managed to bring back manufacturing jobs from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":8701,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8700","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8700","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8700"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8700\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8701"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8700"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8700"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8700"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}