[Unrepentant VN Vet]

...manufacturing is gone...

Maybe not totally gone, but certainly in ICU with all the gizmos hooked up....

One point of disagreement: Salaries/benefits (even if a Union gets into the action) are significant, but not the real Show Stopper.

Get OSHA in a plant, and the payroll costs start to look like bargains.

EPA rolls in, especially with "concerns" about almost anything north of stone pure drinking water, and any business owner with a brain starts shipping the shop back to Taiwan.

(...and from personal experience, even the damn drinking water can get some of those EPA boffins into a swoon----provided they couldn't find anything else to complain about.)

[sloop]

i agree - my major was industrial engineering and i was talking with a couple of industrial engineers that designed gulfstream’s new manufacturing facility - its physically impossible to comply with all the conflicting regulations

i was surprised they chose to build their new g650 here - the new g280 is made in israel - might be some politics involved with the general dynamics stuff and government contracts