Trump has ambitious goals for the economy.

Substantial barriers stand in way of goals for 4% annual growth, 25 million new jobs

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s economic plans are nothing if not ambitious: Annual growth of 4 percent — or more. A diminished trade gap. The creation of 25 million jobs over 10 years, including the return of good-paying factory positions.

It all adds up to an immense challenge, one that Trump aims to achieve mostly by cutting taxes, loosening regulations, boosting infrastructure spending and renegotiating or withdrawing from trade deals. At the top of his agenda: Pulling

out of the 12-nation Pacific trade agreement, a move Trump initiated Monday, his first full weekday in office. He has also said he will rewrite the North American Free Trade Agreement to better serve the United States.

Yet to come anywhere near his goals, economists say Trump would have to surmount at least a handful of major hurdles that have long defied solutions, among them:

Automation: Trump’s goal of vastly expanding manufacturing would require at least the partial reversal of a decades-long trend toward a service-oriented economy and away from factory work.

Even if Trump could return factory production to its heyday by toughening trade deals and threatening to slap tariffs on America’s trading partners, a surge of new jobs wouldn’t necessarily follow. The increased use of robots and automation has allowed factories to make more goods with fewer workers. Research shows that automation has been a bigger factor than trade in the loss of U.S. factory jobs.

The trend is spreading outside factory gates. Uber is experimenting with selfdriving cars. Restaurant chains like Eatsa can now serve meals through an automated order-and-payment system. No cashiers or servers are needed.

“You cannot just slap tariffs on and hope that will bring back middle-class jobs,” says Daron Acemoglu, an economist at MIT. “The jobs that went to China would come back to robots rather than people.”

Skilled worker shortage: Jobs that can’t be automated typically require education beyond high school. Yet not everyone can or wants to attend college. Many analysts say the economy needs better and more widely available posthigh school education and training, whether through community colleges, vocational schools or boot camps offering technology training.

Such a boot camp is how Sharnie Ivery managed to move beyond the retail and sales jobs he’d held right after high school. In 2013, Ivery began a six-month computer coding boot camp at Flatiron School in New York through which he obtained internships. Last year, he began working as a software developer at Spotify, the music streaming service. “There weren’t many opportunities for a career in technology” without training and experience, Ivery, 24, said.

Income inequality: Economic growth since the recession ended has been slow and uneven: It’s benefited wealthier Americans far more than low- and middle-income households. Trump’s nominee for Treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, noted this concern at a confirmation hearing last week: “The average American worker has gotten nowhere,” he said.

The tepid gains for lowand middle-income families have slowed the economy because those groups typically spend more of their income than do affluent households, and consumer spending is the economy’s primary fuel. Against that backdrop, Trump’s goal of 4 percent annual economic growth — a formidable one under any circumstances — might be next to impossible.

A slow-growing workforce: Trump has pledged to add 25 million jobs over the next decade. But with fewer people looking for work now than just a few years ago, it’s unclear where all those extra workers would come from.

The president’s pledge will run up against a longstanding trend: A decline in the proportion of Americans either working or seeking work. That’s largely a reflection of an aging population. Roughly 10,000 baby boomers turn 65 every day, and many retire. The Congressional Budget Office forecasts that the proportion of Americans working or looking for will keep dropping to 61.5 percent by the end of 2020.

Mark Lashinske of Tempe, Arizona-based Modern Industries, which makes machine tools, says he’s struggling to fill 14 machinists’ positions. He blames the steady loss of manufacturing jobs since 1980 for discouraging an entire generation from factory work.

“We’ve been looking for quite a while,” he says. “We have such a shortage.”

Most economists argue that encouraging more legal immigration could help counter an otherwise slow-growing workforce, yet Trump campaigned on tightening immigration restrictions.

“In the absence of immigration, we shrink the size of our population and our economy and our global influence,” Holtz-Eakin says.