“I don’t think we should look at mining to be an engine for job growth,” said Thomas Costerg, senior U.S. economist at Standard Chartered Bank in New York. “You could see a pickup in employment. But on the scale of the U.S. labor market, which is really huge, if you compare what’s really driving job growth right now, which is mostly services,” the sectors affected by energy policy changes are “quite marginal.”
Several charts will flesh out the above statement:
The number of employment jobs relative to total payroll employment has consistently decreased over the last 70+ years, falling from 3% in the 1940s to less than half a percent today. The same pattern emerges with manufacturing jobs:
Manufacturing jobs have fallen from about 30% of total U.S. employment right after WWII to a current level of just below 10%.
The reality is that service sector provides most U.S. jobs:
Service jobs increased from about 50% in the 1960s to 70% today.
Even if we see policies that aggressively promote manufacturing, the U.S. simply doesn't have a large enough pool of potential employees to staff those jobs in large enough quantities to make a meaningful difference in the above figures. That would require an economy wide series of massive programs on par with a military mobilization. I seriously doubt that any administration would undertake such a program, much less a Republican administration.
