Jobs, what the government and media don't tell you.

Politicians like to talk about creating jobs, and it sounds like a noble goal. Many times the reality is far different.

For those of us old enough to remember, in the 80's the US steel industry was crying foul because other countries were producing steel and importing it into the US at cheaper prices. The steel industry said they couldn't compete with  cheap foreign labor. So the lobbyists went to work and succeeded in getting Congress to restrict steel imports. The import restrictions saved 5000 jobs in the US steel industry.

The other side to that story is, because US steel had less competition, it became even more expensive and  manufacturers had to use the more expensive steel to make their products, other foreign products became cheaper for the US consumer and as a result 26,000 workers in other manufacturing industries lost their jobs.

Was it worth it to save 5000 steel workers jobs?

In another example, the restrictions on the importation of sugar is estimated to have cost 3 times as many jobs as it saved in the US sugar industry since many confection manufacturers took their operations to Mexico and Canada where sugar was cheaper.

For both the sugar and steel industries it would have been far better for those two industries to use some good old American ingenuity to come up with innovative ways to reduce labor costs and increase productivity, both of which would have lowered the costs of those two commodities. Far more people would have kept their jobs and it is likely that jobs would have been created by the private sector in the process. And the US would have stayed competitive in the world markets in both of these industries.

Sometimes the government should just mind their own business.