Posted on 08/30/2011 2:24:42 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
THE United States became the worlds largest economy because we invented products and then made them with new processes. With design and fabrication side by side, insights from the factory floor flowed back to the drawing board. Today, our most important task is to restart this virtuous cycle of invention and manufacturing.
Rebuilding our manufacturing capacity requires the demolition of the idea that the United States can thrive on its service sector alone. We need to create at least 20 million jobs in the next decade to offset the effects of the recession and to address our $500 billion trade deficit in manufactured goods. These problems are related, given that service sector accounts for only 20 percent of world trade.
To make our economy grow, sell more goods to the world and replenish the work force, we need to restore manufacturing not the assembly-line jobs of the past, but the high-tech advanced manufacturing of the future.
Advanced manufacturing relies on the marriage of science and engineering in cutting-edge fields. Cepheid, a company in Sunnyvale, Calif., with a market capitalization of more than $2 billion, designs and manufactures sophisticated instruments that use DNA analysis to detect infectious disease and cancer; its products are used by hospitals for diagnoses and by the Postal Service to screen mail for anthrax.
A young company called Lilliputian Systems has developed handheld chargers for mobile devices. The chargers use a recyclable high-energy butane cartridge to replenish cellphones and laptops more efficiently than wall chargers. The company has a pilot manufacturing plant in Wilmington, Mass., plans to expand its production capacity and uses an Intel component that is also made in Massachusetts.
A decade ago, with help from an Energy Department grant, Yet-Ming Chiang, an M.I.T. professor, made a nanotechnology breakthrough by manipulating lithium battery electrodes.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
The below 100 IQ crowd, i.e. half the country, is not going to operate DNA spitting technology. We either raise tariffs and/or cut regulations or resign ourselves to the fact that we will have a welfare state. It is hard for me as a conservative to criticize the welfare state when we outsource EVERY blue collar job that isn’t already done by a illegal alien.
I think the one thing that will help companies is to establish their own schools, educating their own people in the fields that are important to them. I worked for such a company that was having problems finding other companies, in the local area, that could manufacture their products. This company established their own sheet metal shops, casting shops, circuit board manufacturing, etc, etc. They grew to 22,000 employees, world wide, and became a multi-billion dollar company. Profit sharing was unreal. At one time an employee could double their pay. As people got trained in the schools and went on to higher paying jobs, the company would back fill their employees with new hires. They did it right and prospered. It can be done across the nation.
This worked for the company, Tektronix in Oregon, until the founders passed away and the good ole boys took over. Thanks to their ideas, the company is now down to about 5,000 employee and owned by a company not within our borders. We need to go back to some of the old ways that built this country.
...when any union official starts attempting to "organize" any American workforce, they are tarred and feathered forthwith..
....and another way to bring back manufacturing here is to make the Chinese goods relatively expensive...this can be done thru tariffs..
...enough to make Wal Mart look for American goods again...there is no reason that American companies can't make flip-flops etc....therefore creating jobs which anyone can do.
...China won't like it one bit, but screw them...they have 1.4 billion people....they need to get them to buy their stuff.
Oh, I agree our government screws up everything, but the US is still manufacturing many things in spite of the politicians’ efforts to crush our economy.
....see 23....
We CAN make things.
Just get the government and unions the hell out of the way..........
,,,,,,,, it’s the unions and big govt. chasing manufacturing out of this country and until that nut is cracked ,,,, good luck !!!!
The EPA puts lots of barriers into the may of any & all manufacturers in the USA.....new or old. They do their best to stop all activity.
There is no lack of blood, just a glut of vampires in America. just as there is no lack of jobs, just permission from those who set themselves up to be kings.
Manufacturing a Recovery. America Needs to Start Making Things again.
This is obvious but it ain’t going to happen. There is too much money being made through the cheap labor in other countries. To make money in this country it would require us to pollute the air and water, don’t inspect the food or anything else, labor working at coolie wages, end social security, health care, taxes, public education, road maintenance and elect Wall Street favorites. God Help Us.
We can't get out of this recession until we stop free trading with a sworn enemy.
Eliminate regulations against new, small manufacturing starts—especially local regulations (zoning in rural areas).
Yes, it can -- if the government would only leave it alone. The very last thing we need is an industrial "policy".
You're right. That we are still, far and away, the largest manufacturer in the world comes as a surprise to most people. We could manufacture even more if not for Federal Reserve inflationary policies that have made us increasingly uncompetitive.
We can’t export service industry jobs, we can make things because we elect governments that want more employees of their own. Whose sole role it is to make rules against making things. Manufacturing is viewed by the ruling elites in DC as polluting.
We have an industrial “policy”
It’s called “globalization”.
The biggest thing affecting American workers, however, is the fact that labor has now become a global commodity. U.S. workers have now been merged into a global labor pool. Americans must now directly compete for jobs with hundreds of millions of desperate people willing to work for slave labor wages on the other side of the globe.
So exactly how is an American worker supposed to compete with a highly motivated person on the other side of the planet that makes $1.50 an hour with essentially no benefits?
Just think about it.
If you were a big global corporation, would you want to hire American workers which would cost you 10 or 20 times more after everything is factored in? It doesnt take a rocket scientist to figure out why millions of jobs have been leaving the United States. Corporations love to make more money. Many of them will not hesitate for an instant to pay slave labor wages if they can get away with it. The bottom line for most corporations is to maximize shareholder wealth.
Slowly but surely the number of good jobs in the United States is shrinking and those jobs are being sent to places where labor is cheaper.
According to the U.S. Commerce Department, U.S. multinational corporations added 2.4 million new jobs overseas during the first decade of this century. But during that same time frame U.S. multinational corporations cut a total of 2.9 million jobs inside the United States.
So where are all of our jobs going?
They are going to places like China.
The United States has lost an average of 50,000 manufacturing jobs per month since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001.
In addition, over 40,000 manufacturing facilities in the United States have been closed permanently during the past decade.
What do you think is eventually going to happen if the U.S. economy continues to bleed jobs and factories so badly?
As the U.S. has faltered, China has become an economic powerhouse.
Ten years ago, the U.S. economy was three times as large as the Chinese economy. At the turn of the century the United States accounted for well over 20 per cent of global GDP and China accounted for significantly less than 10 per cent of global GDP. But since that time our share of global GDP has been steadily declining and Chinas share has been steadily rising.
According to the IMF, China will pass the United States and will become the largest economy in the world in 2016.
Should we all celebrate when that happens?
Should we all chant Were Number two? Our economy is falling to pieces and the competition for the few remaining good jobs has become super intense.
The average American family is having a really tough time right now. Only 45.4 per cent of Americans had a job during 2010. The last time the employment level was that low was back in 1983.
Not only that, only 66.8 per cent of American men had a job last year. That was the lowest level that has ever been recorded in all of U.S. history.
Just think about that.
33.2 per cent of American men do not have jobs.
And that figure is going to continue to rise unless something is done about these economic trends.
Today, there are 10 per cent fewer middle class jobs in the United States than there were a decade ago. Tens of millions of Americans have been forced to take whatever they can get. A lot of very hard working people are basically working for peanuts at this point. In fact, half of all American workers now earn $505 or less per week.
Things have gotten so bad that tens of thousands of people showed up for the National Hiring Day that McDonalds held. With the economy such a mess, flipping burgers or welcoming people to Wal-Mart are jobs that suddenly dont look so bad.
Right now America is rapidly losing high paying jobs and they are being replaced by low paying jobs. According to a recent report from the National Employment Law Project, higher wage industries accounted for 40 per cent of the job losses over the past 12 months but only 14 per cent of the job growth. Lower wage industries accounted for just 23 percent of the job losses over the past 12 months and a whopping 49 per cent of the job growth.
Thanks to the emerging one world economy, the U.S. is transitioning from a manufacturing economy to a service economy.
But it certainly doesnt help that China is using every trick in the book to steal our industries. China openly subsidizes domestic industries, they brazenly steal technology and they manipulate currency rates.
A recent article on Economy In Crisis described how the Chinese paper industry has been able to grow by threefold over the past decade while the U.S. paper industry has fallen apart .
From 2002 to 2009, the Chinese government poured $33.1bn into what should be an unproductive industry. But, with the help of government subsidies, China was able to ride export-driven growth to become the worlds leading producer of paper products.
In the same time frame that China pumped $33bn into its paper industry, U.S. employment in the industry fell 29 per cent, from 557,000 workers to just 398,000.
So why should we be concerned about all of this?
What is the G.O.P plan to stop this hemmoraging of jobs offshore? More “trickle down”? The tax cuts haven’t done anything to create incentives for multi nationals to stay in this country to create jobs..but globalism is enriching the globalists. Deregulation brought us massive bank bailouts and proved that some oversight on business is needed..
sounds great... even simple...., now get government out of the way of private initiative, reduce corporate taxes, bust unions.... hmmmm everything the Liberal in office stands for... how’s it gonna happen?
The big issue in our inability to compete with China on manufacturing jobs is in large part due to the currency peg the PRC maintains on the yuan.
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