[Will88]

I don’t think you need reliable data to support that claim.

You need some hard data to support this statement:

Kudos to the Freeper who pointed out several months ago that U.S. manufacturing employment would have been declining for years even if the U.S. was the only country in the world, and there was no such thing as "foreign trade."

Many facts refute the above, including:

1. There are many more individual manufactured products produced now than in the past.

2. People own more stuff now, more vehicles, more TVs and more gadgets of both old and newer technology.

3. The US population has increased from about 200 million in the 1960s to about 320 million now.

As I said, the only stat that would really tell us anything about this is one that shows how many manufacturing jobs were required to produce all the manufactured products sold in the US in 2015, and say, several different years going back to the 1960s?

[Alberta's Child]

Here are a couple of interesting graphs for you. They don't represent a perfect comparison because the time periods they cover are different, but they tell the story pretty well. The top one shows total employment in the U.S. manufacturing sector from 1940 to 2015. The bottom one is a comparative index of U.S. industrial output from 1919 to 2015.

What this tells me is that U.S. manufacturing employment peaked in the late 1970s, while industrial output is higher today than ever before. It looks like the U.S. has doubled its industrial output since 1979, with about 40% fewer people working in manufacturing.