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The US economy as a whole is booming. But there are specific factors that restrain certain areas from enjoying that boom.

Manufacturing assembly: There are manufacturing companies that specialize in importing parts and then assembling them. With imports restricted, and maybe restricted more in the future, companies are not willing to pay the price to import and then expand to meet the demand.

The hope is that US manufacturing will emerge to replace the imported parts. To a very small extent that is true. But increased US manufacturing is filling only a small percentage of the demand.

Investors do not want to invest in a policy that might change in 2021 or 2025. For example, I used to work in a plastics factory that did 3 types of plastics molding.... a total of 50+ molding machines that each would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. A robot could do what I did. That would be a million dollar machine.

Who wants to risk that investment?

Employment is a second area where the demand exceeds the supply and is constricting the total market. IT shops cannot find competent workers. My shop signed a $100 million contract with IBM. IBM knew since Jan 2017 that they would get the contract and had our money by May 2018 to hire for the contract.

From May 2018 to March 2019, for a project that will require 50 to 100 IT workers, they have only found 5 or 10 really competent workers. They have hired and fired for incompetence about 50. Yesterday they finally fired as incompetent a person who has not delivered a single useful thing since he came to the project 10 moths ago. He has been carried on the project at $150,000 plus for 10 months.

They have another 20 - 30 people on the project who still have time to prove themselves.

I have seen projects shipped to India because they could not staff up. For legal reasons, this has to be done in GA and will be done in the IBM Smyrna office (western suburb of Atlanta).

Our K-PHD public education system is giving MIS and other IT degrees to people who cannnot read the manual, who cannot google and read documentation on the internet, who cannot play the Sesame Street game “two of these things belong together. One of them is not the same.”

I volunteer to “educate” those who are half-competent. My team lead is afraid that will just encourage IBM to hire more half-competent people.