On Sun, 11 Jan 2009 07:51:13 -0500, wrote:
snip
Manufacturing volume in the US keeps climbing, except for the setbacks in
recessions. In net terms, it hasn't left the US.

Here's durable goods, for example -- the hard stuff:

http://tinyurl.com/8x22df

The factories around here are nearly all laying people off. The
numbers may say one thing, but the Big Three were all up in Washington
with pretty grim forecasts for the future.
snip
----------
Much depends on how you define "manufacturing." The mass
production in the United States of durable such as cars,
appliances, etc. has declined, and the manufacture of consumer
products such as textiles, shoes, consumer electronics, etc. is
tanking where it still existed at all.

There are indeed some specialty manufacturing niches where
activity has increased, but these are not the traditional
manufacturing jobs employing large numbers of skilled and
semi-skilled people, but highly technical, generally *VERY*
capital intensive, operations employing few but generally well
[but not extravagantly] paid employees. Thus, while these
operations may significantly contribute to the GDP, they have
minimal influence on the unemployment rates and per capita earned
income, because of the low numbers [compared to the total
population] of people employed.

What this appears to be showing is that the old mass
production/mass employment economic model is no longer viable,
but that nothing else has been proposed/implemented to absorb the
now redundant workers with anything approaching a middle class
wage. The new knowledge based economy now appears to be a total
academic and political illusion with no justification in fact.

When you are attempting to operate a consumer economy it is
vital, even critical that a significant majority of the
population is able to earn a middle class wage so that they can
afford middle class consumption. Recent history and current
events demonstrates that excessive EZ-credit is no substitute for
an adequate, stable income, and indeed appears to make things
worse in the long run.

Thus it is vital that hallucinations such as the existence of a
US domestic knowledge based economy [where everybody makes a good
living designing each others' web sites] be scrapped and
something else proposed [based on hard, historical data/trends],
evaluated, implemented and tracked for results.

This is not the first time that the US [and indeed western
civilizations] have had to go through some sort of "agonizing
reappraisal" qua economic organization/structure but the
resolutions have always been difficult, time-consuming and
expensive. For example the US Civil War was as much about
resolving the increasingly sharp question whether "traditional
agriculture," or "manufacturing" was to be the dominant
socio-economic structure [think import tariffs], as anything
else.


Unka' George [George McDuffee]
-------------------------------------------
He that will not apply new remedies,
must expect new evils:
for Time is the greatest innovator: and
if Time, of course, alter things to the worse,
and wisdom and counsel shall not alter them to the better,
what shall be the end?

Francis Bacon (1561-1626), English philosopher, essayist, statesman.
Essays, "Of Innovations" (1597-1625).