The death of America's manufacturing sector? Not by a long shot. (UN data, via Mark J. Perry)
Posted on 02/07/2011 4:08:13 AM PST by Kaslin
IN ECONOMICS AS IN APPAREL, most fashions come and go. But like the navy blazer or the little black dress, bewailing the decline of American manufacturing never seems to go out of style.
They're closing down the textile mill across the railroad tracks
Foreman says these jobs are going boys and they ain't coming back.
So sang Bruce Springsteen in "My Hometown," a hit song from his 1984 album, "Born in the U.S.A.". More than a quarter-century later, that sentiment (if not the song) is as popular as ever.
"You know, we don't manufacture anything anymore in this country," says Donald Trump in an interview with CNNMoney. "We do health care; we do lots of different services. But . . . everything is made in China, for the most part."
The Donald has his idiosyncracies, but on this issue, he is squarely in mainstream.
A recent Heartland Monitor survey finds "clear anxiety about the decades-long employment shift away from manufacturing to service jobs," National Journal's Ron Brownstein reported in December. The "decline of US manufacturing" is giving Americans a "sense of economic precariousness" -- only one in five believe that the United States has the world's strongest economy, versus nearly half who think China is in the lead. "Near the root of the unease for many of those polled is the worry that the United States no longer makes enough stuff." When asked why US manufacturing jobs have declined, fully 58 percent cite offshoring by American companies to take advantage of lower labor costs.
There's just one problem with all the gloom and doom about American manufacturing. It's wrong.
Americans make more "stuff" than any other nation on earth, and by a wide margin. According to the UN's comprehensive database of international economic data, America's manufacturing output in 2009 (expressed in constant 2005 dollars) was $2.15 trillion. That surpassed China's output of $1.48 trillion by nearly 46 percent. China's industries may be booming, but the United States still accounted for 20 percent of the world's manufacturing output in 2009 -- only a hair below its 1990 share of 21 percent.
"The decline, demise, and death of America's manufacturing sector has been greatly exaggerated," says economist Mark J. Perry, a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. "America still makes a ton of stuff, and we make more of it now than ever before in history." In fact, Americans manufactured more goods in 2009 than the Japanese, Germans, British, and Italians -- combined.
The death of America's manufacturing sector? Not by a long shot. (UN data, via Mark J. Perry) |
American manufacturing output hits a new high almost every year. US industries are powerhouses of production: Measured in constant dollars, America's manufacturing output today is more than double what it was in the early 1970s.
So why do so many Americans fear that the Chinese are eating our lunch?
Part of the reason is that fewer Americans work in factories. Millions of industrial jobs have vanished in recent decades, and there is no getting around the hardship that has meant for many families. But factory employment has declined because factory productivity has so dramatically skyrocketed: Revolutions in technology enable an American worker today to produce far more than his counterpart did a generation ago. Consequently, even as America's manufacturing sector outproduces every other country on earth, millions of young Americans can aspire to become not factory hands or assembly workers, but doctors and lawyers, architects and engineers.
Perceptions also feed the gloom and doom. In its story on Americans' economic anxiety, National Journal quotes a Florida teacher who says, "It seems like everything I pick up says 'Made in China' on it." To someone shopping for toys, shoes, or sporting equipment, it often can seem that way. But that's because Chinese factories tend to specialize in low-tech, labor-intensive goods -- items that typically don't require the more advanced and sophisticated manufacturing capabilities of modern American plants.
A vast amount of "stuff" is still made in the USA, albeit not the inexpensive consumer goods that fill the shelves in Target or Walgreen's. American factories make fighter jets and air conditioners, automobiles and pharmaceuticals, industrial lathes and semiconductors. Not the sort of things on your weekly shopping list? Maybe not. But that doesn't change economic reality. They may have "clos[ed] down the textile mill across the railroad tracks." But America's manufacturing glory is far from a thing of the past.
Spin, spin, spin, o hell you cannot hit the spin cycle those are made in Mexico.
Global interdependence and global control.
Yeah, right.
bookmark to read later
Except we are importing 60,000 H1-B visa holders to keep wages down in those areas of employment. The rape continues, nothing to see here, move along. Lay back and enjoy it.
The data does not lie. We still manufacture more than anyone else.
However, we could be bigger and do much more manufacturing here.
The problem is not greedy corporations or Chinese wages.
The problem is liberal policies....taxes, regulations, liability and environmentalism that has driven many industries out of this country and prevented more industries from expanding here.
Never believe it yourself, and never let anyone else believe, that manufacturing is leaving for any other reason than liberal policies that have made our companies into the bad guys, saddled them with budensome regulations, taxed them to hell and NIMBY’d their expansion plans.
Manufacturing is strong in this country. They have automated much of it, to avoid lazy employees and unions....and to be competitive with low wages in other countries.
But manufacturing could be stronger. See my previous post.
Hmmmm. Is there something wrong with this picture? Not if you're the one guy getting 10% on that single item and don't give a hoot about the 299 people that are working for minimum wage. It's just dandy that those folks are waiting for you to spend your profits on imported goodies so they can restock the shelves or sell you batteries and yogurt.
The author fails to address the disparity in the article regarding these two quotes that he makes:
“factory employment has declined because factory productivity has so dramatically skyrocketed: Revolutions in technology enable an American worker today to produce far more than his counterpart did a generation ago.”
“A vast amount of “stuff” is still made in the USA, albeit not the inexpensive consumer goods that fill the shelves in Target or Walgreen’s”
Why have the “skyrocketing productivity” and the “revolutions in technology”
skipped over the manufacturing of these “inexpensive consumer goods”?
Why can these things be made by foreigners and shipped here cheaper than we can make them for ourselves?
This bears repeating.
It's just like people who complain about the humidity. They obviously haven't been to Phoenix or Las Vegas.
You can still get items at Wal Mart that is made in the US, You just have to look. I find them all the time
Truth is unacceptable to a mind that is made up
A large part of the problem is greedy corporations. Executives to be exact who manage quarter to quarter to wall street expectations.
They have moved manufacturing, engineering and much of the IT off shore. All in the name of their own stock options.
After moving 50% of IT off shore our CEO was asked why executive jobs are not off shored. We were told because this is an American company. He was serious.
He addressed that point.
Awhhh so lots of American stuff everywhere except for the places most people shop. Gotcha.
-——A large part of the problem is greedy corporations.-——
That is pure drivel. Anti capitalists such as yourself are the enemies of America. I imagine at the root you have a union family background and hate business because of the constant propaganda pounded into you head. Perhaps worse, you are an Obama Marxist hell bent to destroy our great capitalist system.
Either way you are seriously misguided
I do look and I never find them.
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