[T-Bird45]

I’ve been in that business longer than Richard McCormack has been a writer

Ditto...

it started well before George Bush took office

Agreed...

Another jerkoff journalist who never walked the walk

An amazing leap of illogic, IMO -- the primary point of the article is that manufacturing has suffered economic collapse at the same hands (Congress, et.al) as those who crafted the circumstances that led to financial meltdown yet no special effort to "bailout" or "rescue" a basic building block of the economy.

[xDGx]

No, the article is an illogical diatribe that does not examine the confluence of factors that drove much production overseas (unions, regulations, lawsuits, etc.) and devolves into the usual Bush / Iraq / claptrap.

His focus is entirely in that NE corrider of blindness, witness the cities he lists (did he write that riding Amtrak from NY to DC?) Out here in flyover we lost mills and manufacturing, and didn’t bitch and cry about it but got up, dusted ourselves off and went about innovating new technologies. The Chinese (and the Taiwanese, and Koreans, and Germans and so on) make some good stuff, and lots of it goes into bigger things we make. And we turn a profit. And it doesn’t have a damn thing to do with George W. Bush.

There is manufacturing out here, and it is smarter than ever. Lots of older manufacturing plants and techniques went to lower skilled (and lower wage) places because technology compensated for training. We neither need nor want $50/hr union labor watching a machine do its thing. Waste of money. If that union worker wants to train to program the machine, then hell yes we’ll use him. But the world is too competitive to permit nostalgia jobs. They are gone with the wind.

[Vigilanteman]

You are right. The problem hasn't been the free traders. The problem has been the Kool-Aid drinking free traders who have allowed, abetted and encouraged countries like China to enjoy the benefits of free trade without paying the price like allowing freedom. Even the best run company can't make cheaper widgets than the concentration camp using slave labor.

They may make better widgets, but chances are pretty good they may be out of business before the market discovers they make better widgets. This is where NATIONAL INTEREST comes in. Most Favored Nation trading status should never have been a carrot to tempt China to do a few cosmetic reforms. It should have been a reward to those countries which actually earned it by playing by the same rules we expect for ourselves and our real allies.