Jobs and income create a middle class, unless I'm mistaken. So why does it matter whether those jobs and that wealth come at the hands of the manufacturing sector?
I don't get it. Pat Buchanon and many rave about manufacturing jobs, but this is largely a service world these days, often servicing what's been manufactured or providing services for those things: Cars, computers, just about every major appliance out there, the service industry in general which is run on manufactured things. The entire cruise industry exists b/c someone's manufacturing cruise ships. The rest, virtually the entire income structure of the industry is predicated on decades of services off the back of one ship built for instance. That's just one industry. There are many middle class auto repair shop owners that thrive in fixing what someone else has built be it Japanese or American. Etc., etc., etc.
Why anyone has conniption over "manufacturing jobs leaving America" is beyond me. And some Freeper posted to me a few months ago some hard data showing that there's still plenty of manufacturing in this country as well.
How many Americans do you see producing many of the "trinkets" that get produced for pennies over in SE Asia? Talk about jobs that Americans don't want to do.