Trump plan has no place for service

This is a big week for economic speaking on the presidential campaign trail. On Tuesday, Donald Trump gave an address in Detroit, laying out a framework and promising more details later; today Hillary Clinton spoke in nearby Warren summarizing the details she’d released before.

The speeches illustrate many contrasts. Internationalism vs. isolationism. Tax relief for the rich vs. aid to the poor. Growth through clean energy investments vs. exploiting what’s in the ground. And then there’s the projected economic impact: Moody’s Analytics found a wide gap between Clinton’s proposals (slightly higher deficits and lower unemployment) and Trump’s (slower GDP growth and half as many jobs created).

But there’s a more important philosophical difference underlying these two plans. While both candidates issue sentimental appeals to an America that“builds things ,” emphasizing what they’ll do for manufacturing, Trump’s plan seems not to even acknowledge the service sector as a source of job creation.

Just take his big jobs speech from the end of July. Much of it was devoted to throwing up trade barriers, which Trump promises will bring back millions of steel and autoworker jobs from countries like China and Mexico. Then there are the construction workers who’ll be needed to rebuild roads and bridge sand skyscrapers, and coal miners and rig hands who’ll be put back to work when he frees up domestic energy production.

There are some good reasons why we tend to see manufacturing jobs as the most valuable jobs to pursue. They can produce goods for export, which brings capital in from overseas. They have a high “multiplier effect,” creating several more jobs in the surrounding community. They don’t necessarily require many years of education, which means workers can start building wealth right away. Or at least, they used to. These days, manufacturing employment is increasingly bifurcated between the highly-skilled people who program sophisticated machinery and low-paid temps who do what manual tasks the robots haven’t learned yet. To the extent that manufacturing does return to the United States, it will be nowhere near labor-intensive enough to employ the 19 million people it did at its peak in 1979.

Here’s what is growing in America: Service-sector and knowledge economy jobs.

The problem is, those jobs aren’t always the best-paying jobs. Home health aides, for example, have a median annual salary of $21,920. They could have a much bigger economic impact if society valued them enough to pay more, which Clinton does address in her proposals. “We do have to empower the people in our service sector too,” Clinton says.

In Donald Trump’s vision, it’s not clear that those people exist.