His favorite way of expressing the change that he and all of us try to understand is "now, everybody is a consultant."
While that is an exaggeration, of course, it is true that even in the old country there has been a tremendous change in the percentage of labor in anything but agriculture, mining, and manufacturing. There are consultants. Beauty parlors. Investment managers. And that other comment that father makes: "if they are not consultants, they are all doing software."
If that is the story in the old country, it is even more dramatic here in the US. However, listening to trump and his 63 million voters, one would believe that everybody is in farming or mining or making widgets in factories. While facts do not matter to these minions, the rest of us care.
“goods-producing” jobs like logging, mining, construction and manufacturing accounted for only 20.5 million jobs last month, in a nation with 148 million total positions.
Where do the overwhelming majority work then? In the service sector.
If you have a mental model in which the only valuable jobs involve making steel or mining coal, it’s easy to lose sight of some of the middle-income jobs that are more common in the 21st-century service economy. Examples include the blackjack dealer in a Las Vegas casino, the nurse at a hospital renowned for its cancer treatments, the audio technician on a movie set, the engineer who advises companies worldwide on the best way to extract oil.
trump and his fellow idiots want to make America great again by trying to bring back those logging, mining, construction, and manufacturing jobs that will only fade more into the future? What a bunch of morons! "Fucking morons," to quote the now ousted Secretary of State, Wayne Tracker.
Services make a lot of money for the US.
The biggest is travel, which accounted for $204 billion last year. This is an area that the president should know well. When a Canadian couple stays in a Trump hotel in New York, the money they spend counts as a service export.
The next biggest category is “charges for the use of intellectual property,” a category that includes foreigners who pay to watch movies or music made in the United States, as well as licenses of patents and trademarks.
Other big ones include financial services, insurance, telecommunications and information technology, and a wide range of engineering and other consulting services.
If trump really cared for the average, forgotten, people, he should talk more about the plight of fast food workers than pretending to care about the coal mine workers.
Who am I kidding; the narcissist in the Oval Office cares for nobody but himself!
