Leadership Quote by Jerry Costello

A clean statistic can do the moral work of a eulogy, and Costello knows it. By pinning the timeline to "Since 2000", he frames the loss as modern, avoidable, and politically chargeable - not some dusty, inevitable arc of history. The number is big enough to sound like a national injury, but not so abstract that it floats away; "2.7 million" lands as a measurable failure of stewardship.

The real rhetorical twist is the second figure: "500,000" in "high-tech industries". That clause is a preemptive strike against the smug narrative that factory work is low-skill and therefore disposable. Telecommunications and electronics are name-checked to puncture the fantasy that America can casually "move up the value chain" while letting production drift offshore. It's also a quiet warning about national capacity: if you lose the ability to build sophisticated things, you don't just lose paychecks; you lose leverage, supply resilience, and the know-how that compounds over decades.

Costello, a Democratic congressman from Illinois, is speaking from the geography of deindustrialization - places where job loss isn't an economic chart but a neighborhood's slow unspooling. The intent is policy-facing: justify trade skepticism, industrial support, or sharper enforcement against offshoring. The subtext is electoral, too. Manufacturing jobs are treated as a proxy for dignity and stability, and "high-tech" widens the constituency: this isn't only about nostalgia for smokestacks; it's about the future slipping out the back door.