When Barack Obama said manufacturing jobs aren’t coming back, he forgot to tell J.D. Vance.

On Thursday, Vance told Fox News’s Bret Baier he was shocked at the level of next-generation technology he saw at a South Carolina steel manufacturing plant.  “I didn’t fully appreciate how high-tech this steel facility was,” said Vance.  “These are jobs of the future, making American steel, building bridges and automobiles, homes for the American people. And doing it in an incredibly sophisticated way.” 

Vance is right.  And it’s why he should encourage President Donald Trump to make a huge investment into the jobs of the future by approving Nippon Steel’s $21 billion into the American steel industry.

Steel’s bid to take over U.S. Steel would be a massive boon for the American economy, especially in parts of the country that have been harmed by the loss of manufacturing jobs under previous administrations.  The original bid, offered in December 2023, invested $14.1 billion plus over a billion dollars upgrading a Mon Valley, Pennsylvania plant and another $300 million invested in a Gary, Indiana plant. 

These investments would add the technology updates Vance was talking about, refurbishing plants that have languished for years with technical upgrades and years of equipment usage extensions.  And U.S. Steel has promised that the investment — which recently cranked up to a total of about $21 billion, including $5,000 checks to each American worker in the company — would also include opening a technical training center in western Pennsylvania.

As Vance noted, Trump has taken heat for wanting “the jobs of the past.”  These are jobs that then-president Barack Obama said in 2016 were “just not going to come back.”  Of course, some politicians have paid lip service to the future of manufacturing.  The Biden administration invested billions of dollars in so-called “green” energy policies that were designed to replace old manufacturing processes and technologies. 

But — and brace yourself — this was mostly a waste of taxpayer money that actually hurts the environment and doesn’t add to the economic pie.  Nippon Steel’s investment, meanwhile, will actually create positive environmental impacts by upgrading efficiencies and capabilities in old equipment.  On the human level, the investment will directly impact 22,000 Americans and their families and communities.  It will also temporarily employ thousands of others who will upgrade facilities and run the training center in western PA.

And it’s all from the private sector, meaning that it will expand America’s economic pie.  It will increase the tax base.  And it will bring relief to Americans whose professional, financial, and familial futures are uncertain right now. 

With all the cards laid out, it’s time for President Trump to change his mind.  He opposed the Nippon Steel deal on the 2024 campaign trail, and Vance’s home state company Cleveland Cliffs has offered a competing bid to purchase U.S. Steel.  But with $575 million in Biden-era climate funding about to end for Cleveland Cliffs and around 2,000 layoffs announced by the company in recent months, the path to the jobs of the future is clear.

And it doesn’t involve wasting taxpayer dollars for political agendas.  It happens by encouraging private investment that bypasses the arrogance and neglect of Washington elites, and goes right to the hardworking American people.

Image via Pxhere.