Hicks Industries

When President Trump was elected president, he got big-government bureaucracy out of the way and allowed Main Street to flourish again. He put Ohio families first by passing the largest middle-class tax cut in history, allowing hard-working families to keep more of their hard-earned money. And when it comes to job creation, President Trump has been the most job-friendly president our country has ever seen, creating more than 6 million new jobs since he was elected in 2016 – nearly 95,000 of those jobs right here in the Buckeye State.Thanks to President Trump, we can now count a few hundred more jobs in the “win” column right here in Northwest Ohio.Last weekend, President Trump was in Wapakoneta, joined by Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, to celebrate the grand opening of Australian-owned Pratt Industries’ new paper mill, which will create over 300 new jobs with high-paying wages and quality healthcare for Ohio workers. Not only that, one in four of these jobs will be prioritized for America’s veterans.These jobs are a direct testament to President Trump’s business friendly policies that have made the United States the best place in the world to create jobs, build and invest.When President Trump was elected president, Australian businessman Anthony Pratt made a commitment to President Trump that he would invest $2 billion in the United States and add thousands of high-paying manufacturing jobs in the Midwest because as he said, President Trump “made America the greatest place in the world to manufacture.”Part of that promise is now being fulfilled with the grand opening of Wapakoneta’s latest plant.“We proudly declare Pratt Industries and the great, great state of Ohio ‘Open for Business,’” proclaimed President Trump – and he couldn’t be more correct.Ohio is thriving under President Trump’s leadership. Thanks to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, more than 8,000 new jobs were generated in 2018 in Ohio, and the average Ohioan received a savings of over $1,400 alone. For the first time in nearly 20 years, Ohio’s unemployment...

Even as President Donald Trump proclaimed “an economic turnaround of historic proportions” and his top economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, asserted that “this is a boom that will be sustainable frankly as far as the eye can see,” RV manufacturers shipped out 11.4% fewer vehicles and trailers in June 2018 than in the same month a year earlier. Shipments rebounded in July but turned negative again in August, and have been falling short ever since.This RV decline has been getting a lot of attention lately as a possible harbinger of a broader economic downturn to come. The last three recessions (which started in July 1990, March 2001 and December 2007) were all preceded by declines in RV manufacturers’ shipments.Then again, that’s not a big sample size, and there were modest RV-shipment dips in the mid-1980s and mid-1990s that turned out not to precede recessions. “I do want to be clear that we don’t have long enough time series to make a strong causal inference between RV sales and recessions,” emailed Michael Hicks, a professor of economics and director of the Center for Business and Economic Research at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. “But if this were a medical trial involving declining RV sales as a drug to cause recessions, the drug would be approved by the FDA.”I checked in with Hicks recently because (1) my wife and I were about to pay a visit to the RV/MH Hall of Fame (the “MH” can stand for either motor home or manufactured home) in Elkhart, Indiana, the headquarters of the global RV industry, and (2) he has been warning since last fall that the decline in RV shipments might presage bad times ahead. It’s not that the RV industry is itself huge economic force — the combined trailing-12-month revenue of publicly traded RV biggies Thor, Patrick, and Winnebago ($11.7 billion) amounts to just 7.4% of Ford’s.(1)The theory behind an RV-sales/recession link is that they function as an early signal of other problems.“As consumers become less opti...