Posted on 04/09/2025 10:41:59 AM PDT by daniel1212
Coming out of the Second World War, the US was the king of production,” says William B Bonvillian, a lecturer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and an expert in US innovation policy....
by 1945, more steel was produced in the state of Pennsylvania alone than in Germany and Japan combined....
By the turn of the millennium, the US’s global domination in mass-scale industrial production, technology and efficiency was lost. Long-standing issues culminated between 2000 and 2010, when the US lost one-third of its manufacturing jobs....
Between 2000 and 2010, nearly six million jobs in US manufacturing were lost, with the sectors most prone to globalisation displacement, such as textiles and furniture, taking the biggest hit, according to research by Bonvillian and MIT’s Peter L Singer....
The fixed capital investment of manufacturing (plant, equipment, information technology, and so on) actually declined in the 2000s – for the first time since data collection began in 1947...
Meanwhile, US manufacturing output grew only 0.5% per year between 2000 and 2007, and during the global financial crisis of 2007–09 fell by a huge 10.3%...
In 2015, the US ran a trade deficit of $832bn in manufactured goods,..
“Most of the jobs that were lost were in the lower end of production, as opposed to higher skilled jobs,” says Bonvillian. “In other words, one of the main routes into the American middle class just got cut off....
Trump’s politics came right out of that. He was the first US politician to.. speak directly to the anxieties of what the American working class had gone...
coming out of the Second World War, the whole focus for the US innovation system was on early-stage R&D, not manufacturing. “Production was the last thing we worried about, since we were the king. Nobody was remotely close to us,” adds Bonvillian...
Meanwhile, post-war Germany and Japan were rapidly rebuilding their industrial bases to counter mass unemployment. This meant their innovation systems were focused on manufacturing,..
“This imbalance explains why, for many decades now, the US has been innovating new technologies that get built elsewhere,...says Bonvillian. “More recently, we have been trying to pick up the Fraunhofer model [universities and industry working together]. But guess what? China did the exact same thing...
it is becoming increasingly common for US companies to move from ‘innovate in the US and produce abroad’ to ‘do both abroad’....If Apple, the company that was dominating stock markets and largely considered to be heralding the dawning of a new era in innovation, was outsourcing its manufacturing, surely it was on to something?
The feasibility of reshoring factory jobs aside, Trump was in fact reacting to a very real issue...
it wasn’t a sudden burst of robots that took most jobs away, it was other causes, and when you boil it down, it really was the rise of the Chinese economy,” contends Bonvillian...
Not only has China charged ahead of the US in terms of the production process, but it has also done so increasingly with innovation in the past decade....
For all of Trump’s bluster, he had little success in bringing factories home...
Another deeply rooted issue for US manufacturing has been the growing stigma and prejudice about its value. The result: a gaping skills gap...
“Why would a parent want their children to work in a factory where jobs were being lost all the time?” asks Bonvillian.
Meanwhile, the white-collar college dream only grew stronger, with the preference largely being for young people to go into what was considered to be the more academic fields of medicine, law, accounting and services.....
the lack of desire to see young people go into manufacturing jobs adds to a lack of viable educational avenues into the sector, which is exacerbated by the lack of large-scale adoption of innovative technology...
During Clinton’s presidency, the internet and the wider use of computers changed almost every aspect of American life..the increased use of information technology exacerbated the globalisation of manufacturing...
Obama did see some success in creating manufacturing jobs, but he felt short of his one million target and instead manufacturing jobs rose by 590,000 in his second term..
However, since the onset of the manufacturing decline under Reagan, every single Republican president has seen a decrease in average annual manufacturing employment...
A closer look at the crime scene shows that US manufacturing was not killed, but it has endured grievous bodily harm. The American factory has lost its edge. Reclaiming this must be one of the country’s economic and geopolitical priorities.
It was Clinton, with the help of David Rockefeller and his Bilderburg crew.
There are no plots by foreigners. The USA has an aging population that is becoming service-based and focused on asset maintenance rather than manufacturing. There is no longer the pent-up demand for cars, refrigerators, etc., that fed the orders of factories in the 50’s and 60’s. On top of all that, others nations have found it less expensive to make goods in their own countries that formerly had to be imported from the USA. The Democrats have made it increasingly difficult to build factories here but that is OUR fault, not China’s.
Unfortunately American cars are still crappy.
I had the same link.
The topic I was trying to convey was that we were purposely deindustrialized.
Obama got the ball rolling with his Chicago Climate Exchange.
I’m in California and a retired tool designer.
I saw how manufacturing provided healthcare, sick leave, vacation and retirement benefits to people of every skill level.
I saw people rise up through the ranks to become CEOs.
I knew that just about every manufacturing building had CEOs that were considered wealthy.
We could afford to raise a family.
We didn’t have to go into debt to get a college degree.
Some companies even paid for our continuing education.
Few people were complaining it was hard to get healthcare.
We didn’t have a homeless problem.
I was a contract engineer because I enjoyed changing jobs and made more money.
I would work construction remodeling homes in between jobs.
Construction contractors made a good living.
The city of Los Angeles decided to bus our kids to Black neighborhood schools.
The Whites moved out of the school district.
Then the illegal aliens came in to fill all the empty homes.
They found work building homes for the White people that fled the Los Angeles schools.
The Blacks and illegal aliens fought each other and the illegal aliens wouldn’t talk to the police.
Driveby shootings were common.
So they made Los Angeles a sanctuary city.
The police are not allowed to ask immigration status.
We passed Prop 187 to deny illegal aliens government funds.
Judge Mariana Pfaelzer overturned our vote.
The illegal aliens invaded the rest of the state.
The Arab Spring wars we were fighting in were not sanctioned as an act of war.
Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Syria did not threaten us.
They were not harboring terrorists.
Obama just wanted to insert his own people to rule those countries.
Morsi was teaching at California State University Northridge.
Obama made him the president of Egypt.
600,000 people died in the Syrian War.
6 million Syrians were made refugees.
The demographics of Europe and the U.S. changed.
We had a bunch of illiterates move to our country and
Obama wanted Americans to take care of them.
His idea was to take away our cars and make us take public transportation.
Subsidizing the poor illiterate aliens.
He was building high density apartments along transportation corridors to prevent us from driving.
Americans would have to move into those apartments and subsidize the illiterates.
Obama claimed that carbon dioxide was a man-made greenhouse gas.
By giving up our cars and moving into an apartment building we could save the world.
California passed a carbon tax that chased manufacturing out.
Driving and the Built Environment
Transportation Research Board
Washington, D.C.
2009
https://onlinepubs.trb.org/Onlinepubs/sr/sr298.pdf
California is 26.7% foreign born.
https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/CA/POP645223
21.1% are high school graduates.
59.8% speak a language other than English in Los Angeles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Los_Angeles
In 1992 Maurice Strong introduced Agenda 21 to the Rio Summit.
https://canadafreepress.com/article/the-new-world-devised-by-maurice-strong-and-george-soros
Nancy Pelosi introduces Agenda 21 to Congress
https://www.congress.gov/bill/102nd-congress/house-concurrent-resolution/353
H.Con.Res.353 - Expressing the sense of the Congress that the United States should assume a strong leadership role in implementing the decisions made at the Earth Summit by developing a national strategy to implement Agenda 21 and other Earth summit agreements through domestic policy and foreign policy, by cooperating with all countries to identify and initiate further agreements to protect the global environment, and by supporting and participating in a high-level United Nations Sustainable Development Commission.
Sponsor:Rep. Pelosi, Nancy [D-CA-5] (Introduced 08/05/1992)Committees:House - Foreign Affairs | Senate - Foreign RelationsLatest Action:Senate - 10/08/1992 Referred to the Committee on Foreign Relations. (All Actions)
California jumps on the global warming fear mongering and creates a law to tax CO2.
Manufacturing flees California.
They then redistributed the wealth to disadvantaged communities with the CO2 tax.
California has a Disadvantaged Communities Map that closely matches the immigration map.
https://oehha.ca.gov/calenviroscreen/sb535
Senator Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) passed SB 35 to allow low income high density housing in single family neighborhoods.
https://sd11.senate.ca.gov/news/20230213-senator-wiener-introduces-legislation-strengthen-extend-success-housing-streamlining-0
That’s exactly how I remember it. 70’s to 80’s we were browbeaten into seeing the U.S. as a “service economy”. We didn’t make anything anymore! I recall bringing a mag flashlight to my father and saying, “here is the only thing left that is made in the USA”.
Capitalist principles did.
George W Bush is a traitor to humanity. He killed what was left after CLinton did his thing.
however, now he is working on a deal whereby they do NOT buy it out, but invest in the company short of majority ownership.
Nippon Steel isn't stupid. Why should they put billions into a company where they're not going to have the ability to run the company? They don't want US Steel's legacy albatross of the Steelworkers or any of the rest of it. That would be just putting good money after bad.
Nippon Steel was the best route to save US domestic Steel production. They both trashed the deal for political reasons.
Japanese car companies are able to produce superiors cars in the U.S. for which there is often a months-long wait if you want to buy one.
Please re-read my post. You might have missed something.
However, the US does purchase vast amounts of merchandise from China. Perhaps an Shenzhen experiment could be engaged in here, with workers being paid whatever the employer offers, but which brings together dense clusters of suppliers, logistical infrastructure (including highways, railroads, and ports), skilled workers, economic investment and tax incentives.
Cheap foreign labor and bad “free trade” arrangements.
Also, American companies were used to being #1 so they didn’t innovate.
Not much social solidarity either. A German or Swedish or Japanese company couldn’t care as little about its German, Swedish, or Japanese workers (and vice versa) as an American company could.
Quite the expose.
Over the past four years, China has pulled money from funding housing construction and put it into building factories, with state-controlled banks granting industrial borrowers almost $2 trillion in extra financing, according to new data from China’s central bank, obtained by The Times. China is building new factories nonstop and outfitting old ones with the latest tech, churning out products from cars to phones to fertilizer at an unprecedented rate — and all bound for foreign shores.
Which is akin to the US production system in WW2. China can retool, and thus it is preparing for war.
They also seriously overbuilt on housing, but their manufacturing capacity is foreboding indeed.
I have no idea what happened, my husband and I bought American... vehicles to kids toys. Sears for appliances and tools. Walmart when they proudly sold American. Little by little American made just vanished.
We noticed but politicians and “experts” told us it was a good thing. The day we went to Sears to buy a washer/dryer set and get a lawn mower fixed we were in for a real shock. 1st we were told they no longer repaired anything there it would have to be shipped 300 miles to a service center and we couldn’t get an estimate on repairs. We were expected to pay $100 up front and any difference would be charged to our card. Only then would we know cost of repairs.
Hubby decided to work on it himself. Then we looked at washer/dryer... tried to. The appliance person could not answer one question I asked.
We went to Home Depot. This was not at the end of Sears... way before they got with Kmart. They still looked like Sears but was nothing like Sears.
I was a third generation Sears shopper. My grandfather used to trap, ship his furs to Sears on the train and get store credit. There was not a Sears store anywhere near him but he had the catalog.
I don’t know what happened but I didn’t stop buying American, until I had no choice. I still buy American when I can find it.
No, I think you forgot to include something.
You and me have been among the “buy American” crowd, and there we shall stay. From my experience with retailers like “Wally World”, I think the retailers kept pushing on manufactures until there was nothing but American labor to take out of products. I put the blame on retailers first and then customers second.
In reading this It looks like the problem has been poor executive management of the economy that is…until Trump came along.
Trump is working to fix it for those that elected him exactly because of his fortitude and resolve to do so.
Finally, there’s more hope and optimism in this nation than there has been in a really long time.
Since before my time…born in 1963.
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