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To: libill
What factories? The U.S. doesn't make much any more.

In terms of value in dollars, the U.S. makes more today than it ever has it its history. The difference is in two places. One, what companies are making things, and two, how many people it takes to make a thing.

Today, it takes far fewer auto workers to build a car than it did in 1950. And cars built in America does not mean Detroit and the "Big Three". It means the sunbelt and Toyota, Honda, BMW, Mercedes, and Hyundai.

Also, manufacturing does not just mean motors and things with motors. It also means chips and things with chips. And many of those chips (and most of the most complicated chips) are manufactured in America. One of the great myths out there is chip manufacturing is all moving to Taiwan. The reality is only the U.S., Japan, Europe, and Israel can fabricate sophisticated semiconductors such as high-end microprocessors.

People wrongly associate manufacturing jobs with manufacturing capacity or manufacturing output.

And the "manufacture" (that is, programming) of software is not included in manufacturing output, nor is the sale of software to overseas customers included in trade deficit. Only the value of the CD-ROM (assuming it is even shipped by CD-ROM) and printed manuals are included in foreign trade numbers. So billions of dollars of Microsoft, Oracle, and IBM software created in America by thousands of American engineers is not included in the trade numbers.

Similarly to the myth about semiconductors, all software programming is not moving to India. Software creation is as much an art as a science, and artists tend to come from free societies. Because of this, new, innovative software, and highly complicated software will continue to to come from the U.S. and Europe. Low-level software such as device drivers will be shipped overseas.

73 posted on 11/17/2005 11:32:48 AM PST by magellan ( by)
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To: magellan
Sure that's why Nvidia and Ati outsource the manufacture of it's GPU's to TSMC (Taiwan). That's also why Texas Instruments licenses its DLP technology to be built by Samsung. Lots of foreign automobile companies assemble cars in the United States, not manufacture them. They all do that to help the American worker.
77 posted on 11/17/2005 12:34:52 PM PST by libill (Socialism is Communism with a happy face)
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