[snopercod]

I guess my bias is showing, but I consider "service" people as merely support for those who design, build, test, and troubleshoot tangible goods that can be sold.

The lawyers, accountants, bean-counters, government regulators, janitors, etc. are merely overhead for the ones who built America.

The test is simple: Who would still have a job if the other were to suddenly disappear? Example: If the people who design and build the airplanes at Boeing were suddenly to disappear, would the janitors still have a job?

No, they wouldn't.

But if you reversed it and made the janitors disappear, the engineers would still have a job.

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

Please don't take this personally, but I find your argument childish and wrong-headed. If there were no trucks to deliver manufactured goods they would pretty much worthless, but trucker driving is classed as "service", while the person to takes the goods from packaging to the loading dock is classed as "manufacturing". In a complex economy, labor produces a variety of outputs. A person cooking a meal is actually "manufacturing", then is the waitress "service" or like the guy who moves stuff from the assembly line to the loading dock, "manufacturing".