Dear Indiana: You’re Not Getting Killed On Trade

[Geee]

The Federalist:

Next week’s Indiana primary looms large as one of the two remaining contests that will decide whether Donald “Presumptive” Trump really will be the GOP nominee for president in 2016. Given the state’s importance, Trump will spend the next several days cruising around the Hoosier State reciting his usual stump speech about the devastating effects of free trade on the state’s manufacturing sector and economy more broadly—a problem Trump alone (of course) can fix through tariffs and “better trade deals.”

 

Proof of this devastation once again comes from Trump’s angry references to the now-infamous video showing Carrier management informing some Indiana employees they were moving some production, and production jobs, to Mexico. A simple glance at the facts, however, reveals the Carrier anecdote to utterly unrepresentative of the economic situation in Indiana. Indeed, there may be no state in the country that, at least on paper, should be less amenable to Trump’s doomsday message about trade and American manufacturing.

 

Indiana’s Manufacturing Sector Is Healthy

Perhaps the most important fact about Indiana’s economy—and one you won’t be hearing from Trump or his media buddies—is that the state’s manufacturing sector is thriving. According to government data compiled by the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), Indiana leads the nation in manufacturing’s share of state gross domestic product (a whopping 29.45 percent, while most states are in the low teens) and jobs (17.06 percent).