A lot of fake employment and low productivity jobs are in the government/NGO sector, paper pushers, DEI jobs, law/compliance type jobs - that should have been manufacturing jobs instead.
USA has no shipyards and infrastructure is crumbling precisely because of misallocation of resources and labor
Heck, the _whole_ Federal government workforce is less than 2% of the total workforce.
> USA has no shipyards and infrastructure is crumbling precisely because of misallocation of resources and labor
Yes, and you have tariffs to thank for this. The Jones Act requires US-built ships for any ship traffic within the US waters.
So the shipbuilders were insulated from competition and just degraded into Defense contract moochers.
Jones Act is the reason US has at least some form of domestic shipbuilding
For example, the Washington state needs new ferries, and their cost is literally almost 10x than the cost for the similar ferries produced in Turkey for the nearby Vancouver, BC. With this kind of cost gap, there is simply nobody who would buy the US ships unless they _have_ to.
Without the Jones Act, the shipbuilders would have adapted long ago to produce high-margin high-tech components for the ships for the international market. And likely in larger quantities than they do currently.
That's because of the Jones Act and other poorly designed protectionism.