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Although there have been many historic developments in DC since January 20, the most notable physical feat belongs to Senator Cory Booker. Starting the evening of March 31, Senator Booker spoke for 25 hours straight without sitting down or going to the bathroom. Booker was two years ahead of me in law school. And while he had a reputation for befriending everyone, as well an unorthodox affinity for Judaism (Booker, a Methodist, co-founded the campus chapter of Chabad), he wasn’t renowned for being able to hold it in.
Medical professionals speculated that Booker may have been wearing a diaper. But after his 25-hour warning to America, after breaking segregationist Strom Thurmond’s record for the longest speech in Senate history, Booker revealed to reporters that he’d fasted for 72 hours before taking the floor and had no fluids for 24 hours.
Saints are canonized for miracles, but also for suffering. During his ordeal, Booker suffered from cramps, dehydration, and – lack of intake notwithstanding – a need to go. As my wife has something of a phobia about using public bathrooms, the next time she needs to hold it in, I’m going to advise her to pray to the Senior Senator from New Jersey. Because the ecumenical Cory Booker is now the patron saint of not going to the bathroom.
Booker’s speech occurred right before President Trump came out with “reciprocal” tariff calculations based on a seemingly impenetrable formula where selected parameters (4 and 0.25) meant the Greek-letter variables multiplied to 1 – a poor attempt to conceal a measure of trade deficits rather than unnatural barriers. On the eve of the trade math and stock market apocalypse, in the 24th hour of his speech, Booker had a colloquy on tariffs with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.
Schumer: Does my colleague remember the names of Smoot and Hawley?
Booker: Smoot and Hawley, yes sir. I definitely remember those names from high school history. So yes, what he's going to do tomorrow is going to rattle the stock markets.
Over the next week, President Trump made Saint Booker look like a prophet to boot. And last week when Trump liberated the country from “Liberation Day” – resulting in a market rally that resonated of an abusive marriage where things seem better than they ought to when you’re not being abused, or the parable of the Rabbi telling the beleaguered farmer to bring the barnyard animals into his house (a week later, after the Rabbi instructs him to remove the animals, everything’s great) – he couldn’t have done a better job of undermining his stated purpose of bringing back lost manufacturing jobs. Why would companies build new factories in America if the rules are certain to change? Meanwhile, President Trump risks unwittingly becoming an environmental champion by slowing economic activity i.e., causing a recession. If this is protectionism, it’s predatory protectionism. And American consumers are President Trump’s prey.
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Part of the problem stems from Trump’s manufacturing mania. The notion that the economy consists primarily of making, selling, and consuming tangible things was mostly true in the 1890s, and somewhat true when Trump developed his idée fixe in the 1980s. But you’d think that someone who used to run beauty pageants, owns a social network, and whose family is investing heavily in cryptocurrency would know better. Services account for about 80% of U.S. GDP and jobs. And while Trump and his acolytes would say our diminished manufacturing and industrial base is the point, even Germany – the West’s manufacturing/industrial leader – is still 70% services.
Cautionary tales abound about pulling out all the stops to protect physical production. Germany, the world’s third-largest economy, has a negligible presence in the digital economy, failing to produce a digital champion since the dawn of the Internet. Japan protected legacy products like the Sony Walkman and Panasonic TVs and missed the boat on software and flat screens. Meanwhile, at least as of January 19, the American economy in aggregate was the envy of the developed world.
Much of this can be attributed to our strength in services. While we have a $1.2T annual trade deficit in goods, we have a $300B surplus in services. As the Wall Street Journal put it, “For decades, the U.S. and the rest of the world had a deal: Other countries sent cars, phones, clothes and food to the U.S., and in return they got bonds, software and management consultants.” If Trump’s formula accounted for services as well, the trade deficit (and tariff) on the European Union would shrink by half and Switzerland’s by 2/3.
But I suppose President Trump’s focus is understandable. Services are ineffable. They can’t be seen or touched, can’t be tariffed, can’t be covered with cheap gold plate. Still, if the President is truly focused on jobs, he should recognize that the average professional and business services job pays 25% more than the average manufacturing job. And that young people in former hubs of industry may not be interested in manual labor with little career mobility. As one former South Carolina textile worker told the New York Times, “The textile industry is dead. Why would you want to bring it back here? Truthfully, why would the younger generation want to work there?”
In terms of job creation and economic mobility – what dislocated manufacturing workers and discarded manufacturing towns need most, and why many became Trump supporters – I suspect there are two reasons why good services jobs aren’t registering for this administration. First, like the services they deliver, the jobs are intangible and often unintelligible. While manufacturing jobs are easily understood (inputs → manufacturing process → product), grasping good services jobs requires some industry or functional background.
Take a position as a HR tech specialist. In this video from Workday, Annie Vernon – who launched her career and gained a Workday HCM certification (Workday’s core HR SaaS platform) through Helios’ Horizons apprenticeship program – reports on her work trajectory:
I started by supporting multiple HCM implementation projects… Within weeks I was working on projects where I was tracking test statuses, reworking configurations for failed tests, and providing instructions to clients. Soon after I was managing initial configurations, troubleshooting issues with my leads and architects, and independently handling security roles, business processes, and integrations.
All this makes sense to someone with a tech consulting background, but probably not to most senior officials in the Trump administration. And it’s far more complex than working in a factory.
Even so, there’s another important reason why Trump skips services. It’s obvious how someone can launch a career in manufacturing: graduate from high school, get a job in a plant. Advanced manufacturing aside, high school is often enough. But that’s not the case for good services jobs. Workday specialists and thousands of other positions require postsecondary education or training. But since free trade became dogma for both parties in the 1980s and 90s, federal and state college-for-all policies have doled out hundreds of billions of dollars in public funding each year to degree-centric postsecondary institutions without any accountability for employment outcomes while expecting students to take both (and increasingly inordinate) financial and employment risk. Crucially, this policy has done an awful job of redistributing gains from trade. As demonstrated by dollar stores, drug overdoses, and dismal opportunity in Trump-supporting former manufacturing towns, we have overinvested in classroom-based, tuition-based, debt-based career launch (or re-launch) infrastructure and dramatically underinvested in earn-and-learn models to lower both financial and employment barriers for the communities that have become the flotsam and jetsam of international trade.
Trump’s manufacturing compulsion can be explained as a natural reaction to a faltering education and workforce system. Because we haven’t invested in or scaled a solution to help manufacturing towns evolve, he assumes they can’t – an assumption that leads to an economy of stasis, like we’re back in the gold-plated 80s. In this context, putting all our chips on manufacturing is a bet that makes sense even if tariffs don’t.
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Even if President Trump is successful at convincing companies to open and expand factories in the U.S., like Germany and Japan, there’s a real risk of taking one step forward and two steps back. What if we bring back manufacturing jobs while tech services jobs get offshored? While America’s been losing millions of manufacturing jobs, we’ve also seen millions of good services jobs go to India, the Philippines, Eastern Europe, and beyond. It’s not just customer service, but a wide range of tech and business processes including tech support, software development, QA testing, infrastructure management, cybersecurity, data engineering, billing, accounts payable, tax, document review, contract management, market research, marketing, logistics, and HR. As we’ve learned from remote work, digital jobs can be done from anywhere. So why should companies pay higher U.S. salaries when they can hire lower cost tech services workers offshore?
Anyone who’s been stuck on a customer service call with an agent based in India recognizes that offshored services can fall short of expectations. But American companies already deploy hundreds of billions of dollars each year on offshored software development and are increasing offshore spend 8-10% each year. And as AI winnows these jobs, it’s also likely to close the offshore quality gap. So if sourcing tech services workers offshore becomes the default before President Trump concludes his second term, how can we stop tech services hubs like Columbus or Charlotte from becoming growth areas for dollar stores?
Let’s hope we can make progress before Trump’s team comes up with ham-handed protectionist measures for these jobs. The good news is that the best way to protect ourselves is the same prescription for curing our manufacturing compulsion in the first instance: investing in a more balanced education and workforce system.
The truth is that we don’t need to protect these jobs. As a result of an education system that hasn’t kept pace with digital transformation, millions of talented young Americans are underemployed and want good services jobs. If we can provide them with guaranteed career paths, our next generation of workers is willing to work for affordable wages. We just need to build the earn-and-learn pathways for them to follow. If we can deliver a large, high-ceiling, and well-trained early-career labor pool to U.S. companies, they won’t need to offshore in order to average down their cost of labor.
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It’s not only MAGA Republicans. As Catherine Rampell pointed out in the Washington Post, progressive Democrats have demonstrated similar protectionist tendencies. President Biden not only maintained tariffs from Trump’s first term, he expanded them. House Democrats have taken to attacking the “wrong-for-decades” consensus on free trade while Senator Elizabeth Warren thinks the biggest problem with Trump’s tariffs is that companies will use them as an excuse for price gouging. This computes as President Biden, House Democrats, and Senator Warren were the engines behind college-for-all, free-college, and student loan forgiveness. There’s a fundamental connection between America’s imbalanced approach to economic mobility and the populist consensus on erecting trade barriers to protect manufacturing. Protectionism is a mistake that’s attempting to correct for the mistake of college for all.
In order to help both parties expand their view to 100% of the economy vs. less than 20%, in order to stop the loss of good services jobs, and in order to reduce Cory Booker’s suffering the next time he feels compelled to take the Senate floor, we need to scale investment in earn-and-learn infrastructure. That’s the only surefire way to protect us from protectionism.