May 06, 2016
The Washington Post had a piece noting that it is unlikely that the economy will produce the 1 million new jobs in manufacturing by 2016, as promised by President Obama in 2012. The piece is implies that this was an unrealistic promise that Obama should not have made. In fact, the economy had lost more than 2 million manufacturing jobs in the recession, so it was very reasonable to expect that it would get at least half of these jobs back, as it had in prior recoveries.
Jobs in Manufacturing
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The main reason why we did not recover more manufacturing jobs is that the non-oil trade deficit increased by more than 1 percent of GDP since 2012. If the deficit had remained constant as a share of GDP, then we would have easily exceeded the one million jobs target.
The piece also mentioned that President Obama had increased spending on community colleges by $2 billion over the last four years. This is a bit more than 0.01 percent of federal spending over this period.
Note:
As Ryan Denniston rightly points out in his comment, expressing the spending on community colleges as a share of the total budget is not very helpful. As a better point of reference, the American Association of Community Colleges put the number of people taking courses at community colleges at 12.8 million in the fall of 2012. This means that the $500 million in addition annual spending secured by President Obama would come to a bit less than $40 per student per year.
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