Scott Bessent says America’s in a ‘manufacturing renaissance,’ so where are the jobs?

Testifying before the Senate Finance Committee on Wednesday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent leaned hard into a boom narrative, telling lawmakers the country is “having a manufacturing renaissance.” He pointed to roughly 90,000 new non‑residential construction jobs tied to factories, a 50% expansion of Boeing’s plant in Charleston, S.C., that he said will translate into 1,000 high‑paying manufacturing jobs, new John Deere facilities in Indiana and North Carolina, and pharmaceutical companies reshoring production. Taken together, it’s the picture of a genuine build‑out: Trade groups count more than 130 semiconductor‑related projects worth over $600 billion announced since 2020, while clean‑energy trackers show record battery and solar capacity coming online, heavily concentrated in a few states. Bessent credited Trump’s Working Families Tax Cuts and full‑expensing provisions for tilting investment decisions in America’s favor, citing Winnebago’s choice to build a battery research facility in Florida after the tax code boosted its internal rate of return, which he said means more jobs in the “Sunshine State.” On the other end of the financial spectrum, Apollo Global Management chief economist Torsten Slok has been telling clients a remarkably similar story, minus the partisan edge. In recent notes and presentations, Slok has argued the U.S. is in the midst of an “industrial renaissance,” driven by a wave of factory construction, mega-projects in semiconductors, batteries, and clean energy, and a multi‑year capital‑expenditure boom. In his 2026 outlook, Slok placed industrial surge as a key “tailwind,” alongside AI investment and fiscal stimulus, as key reasons the economy has remained more resilient than expected, even after a bruising inflation scare and sharply higher interest rates. There’s just one problem: Where are most of the jobs? A rare point of consensus Where Bessent and Slok diverge is in how cleanly this renaissance story fi