GOP senator lays out why he thinks Trump's Ford and Carrier deals don't really matter

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Ben Sasse

Nati Harnik/AP Images

President-elect Donald Trump campaigned on a platform of bringing manufacturing jobs back to the US. And during the weeks since his election, Trump has tried to deliver on this promise.

Trump has announced that Ford will keep production of its Lincoln MKC in Kentucky and Carrier will keep about 800 workers and the production of some air-conditioning units in Indiana.

But Republican Sen. Ben Sasse, a rising GOP star and prominent critic of Trump along the campaign trail, thinks the deals may miss the point entirely.

Sasse sent out a series of tweets Thursday that poured cold water on the supposed manufacturing victories for Trump.

"Morning news pretends there's a simple political solution to the declining [number] of manufacturing jobs," Sasse tweeted. "It's not true. We should tell the truth."

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Sasse noted, as have others like Nobel-winning economist and New York Times Paul Krugman, that trying to keep jobs from going overseas is a temporary fix given the trend toward automation in the industrial sector.

"Automation - even more than trade - will continue to shrink the number of manufacturing jobs. This trend is irreversible," Sasse said.

Sasse added that manufacturing employment has been declining for some time and output is still on the rise, which means that firms are becoming more productive - and employment needs to shift elsewhere.

As an example, the GOP lawmaker cited the percentage of Americans that are farmers, which has decreased from 90% of the population in 1790 to just 3% in 1980. This sort of shift will come to manufacturing, he said.

Sasse continued that "politicians are not good at telling the truth," but they should be honest with the American about the changing dynamics of the job market. Essentially, people shouldn't expect to have the same factory job as the previous generation and different training is needed.

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Here's the full tweetstorm:

 

 

 

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