Not to mention that those folks are not going to be very good at manufacturing jobs. People who are good at shop (to use a term meant generally to refer to making things in the physical world) can work in those fields. People who aren't good at shop go into office work. Or health care work. Or park ranger work. Or any types of careers that do not require shop facility.
You can't take a VA nurse and make him/her into an auto worker. Especially if that person has been a nurse for 20 years. There are skills, habits of mind, physical factors that person won't have, and will instead have different ones.
This is a perfect example, though, of the mindset of financiers like Bessent -- who, we have to remember, are the real out-of-touch elites. Having known people in that world, and judging from Bessent's comments, I'm confident he views the labor market as a tiered ladder. Everyone at a high rung can do the jobs of the people in the lower rung. People like him, of course, can do any job -- not that he ever would, you know, but it's possible.
For instance, there is a zero percent chance that I could be successful on a meat processing line. I simply cannot maintain my concentration on that task for so long. My mind will wander onto something unrelated, and then I fuck up four of my cuts and maybe I get a finger cut off or something. My guess is that many government employees would have a very hard time maintaining that consistent focus. To work in an office is to be in a place where that type of consistent focus is not valued; rather, the coin of office work tends to be context switching. It's probably not a bad assumption that my mind is naturally and perhaps genetically peripatetic, but other people learn that type of mental processing. After 15-20 years of it, I find it very hard to believe that a person can just switch modes.
