Posted on 02/22/2004 12:00:44 AM PST by Destro
It is if you are a Republican.
The Teamsters want to know, too....
It is if you're a Democrat and can unionize it....
I was only partly joking. Making hamburgers is a food service job. Anybody who wants to reclassify that as a manufacturing job is a lunatic.
Only if they're the new Angus beef burgers at Hardee's.
Where did you get that from this article? All I see is, "No answers were offered."
You just have to love government BureaucRATS. One little change in the BMI (Body-Mass-Index) standards and instantly - the majority of Americans are sigificantly overweight or obese. One small change in a manufacturing category and PRESTO! - a miraculous recovery in manufacturing employment.
Bush would do well to fire this slimy sleight-of-hand clown - before Democrats have a field day with this.
Box 2-2: What Is Manufacturing?The value of the output of the U.S. manufacturing sector as defined in official U.S. statistics is larger than the economies of all but a handful of other countries. The definition of a manufactured product, however, is not straightforward. When a fast-food restaurant sells a hamburger, for example, is it providing a service or is it combining inputs to manufacture a product?
The official definition of manufacturing comes from the Census Bureaus North American Industry Classification System, or NAICS. NAICS classifies all business establishments in the United States into categories based on how their output is produced. One such category is manufacturing. NAICS classifies an establishment as in the manu-facturing sector if it is engaged in the mechanical, physical, or chemical transformation of materials, substances, or components into new products.
This definition is somewhat unspecific, as the Census Bureau has recognized: The boundaries of manufacturing and other sectors can be somewhat blurry. Some (perhaps surprising) examples of manufac-turers listed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics are: bakeries, candy stores, custom tailors, milk bottling and pasteurizing, fresh fish packaging (oyster shucking, fish filleting), and tire retreading. Sometimes, seem-ingly subtle differences can determine whether an industry is classified as manufacturing. For example, mixing water and concentrate to produce soft drinks is classified as manufacturing. However, if that activity is performed at a snack bar, it is considered a service.
The distinction between non-manufacturing and manufacturing industries may seem somewhat arbitrary but it can play an important role in developing policy and assessing its effects. Suppose it was decided to offer tax relief to manufacturing firms. Because the manu-facturing category is not well defined, firms would have an incentive to characterize themselves as in manufacturing. Administering the tax relief could be difficult, and the tax relief may not extend to the firms for which it was enacted.
For policy makers, the blurriness of the definition of manufacturing means that policy aimed at manufacturing may inadvertently distort production and have unintended and harmful results. Whenever possible, policy making should not be based upon this type of arbitrary statistical delineation.
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