TIM WORSTAL
Some years back President Obama asked Steve Jobs when all those manufacturing jobs in China, where Apple products were being assembled, were going to return to the U.S. Jobs simply said that they’re never coming back. And he was right.
Electronics assembly is something that will either be done by cheap foreign labor or robots within the U.S. There just won’t be (barring an economic meltdown of truly Venezuelan proportions) those sorts of jobs in those sorts of numbers in the U.S. ever again.
And the same is largely true of those coal mining jobs in Appalachia. Donald Trump tells us that he will bring them back but it’s just not going to happen.
There always will be a coal industry of some size because you’ll need it for something other than energy. There are certain parts of steel making that really do require coal; you can’t use nuclear, solar nor, while it would theoretically possible, natural gas. However, the big use, the one providing the volume to the business, has been thermal coal for power generation. And that market is just going to be a lot smaller in the future. Thus Trump’s promises top bring all those mining jobs back just isn’t going to happen:
West Virginians’ newfound animosity for the Clintons significantly stems from Hillary’s March promise to ‘put coal miners out of work’ if elected president, which predictably did not sit will with the state’s many coal miners. She has since backtracked, apologizing for the comment this week.
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