By any economic measure we are wealther now than ever before in history.
A graph of the DJIA from 1900 to 2004.
This supports your statement DB.
Posted on 12/31/2006 6:25:30 AM PST by A. Pole
AMERICAN manufacturers no longer make subway cars. They are imported now, and the skills required to make them are disappearing in the United States. Similarly, imports are an ever-bigger source of refrigerators, household furnishings, auto and aircraft parts, machine tools and a host of everyday consumer products much in demand in America, but increasingly not made here.
[...]
the experts shifted the emphasis from production to design and innovation. Let others produce what Americans think up.
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But over the long run, can invention and design be separated from production? That question is rarely asked today. The debate instead centers on the loss of well-paying factory jobs and on the swelling trade deficit in manufactured goods. When the linkage does come up, the answer is surprisingly affirmative: Yes, invention and production are intertwined.
"Most innovation does not come from some disembodied laboratory," said Stephen S. Cohen, co-director of the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy at the University of California, Berkeley. "In order to innovate in what you make, you have to be pretty good at making it — and we are losing that ability."
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Franklin J. Vargo, the association’s vice president for international economic affairs, sounds even more concerned than Mr. Cohen. "If manufacturing production declines in the United States," he said, "at some point we will go below critical mass and then the center of innovation will shift outside the country and that will really begin a decline in our living standards."
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"It is hard to imagine," Mr. Tonelson said, "how an international economy can remain successful if it jettisons its most technologically advanced components."
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(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
We've been "giving it away" for a long, long time. Why are we continuing to get wealthier?
"The United States is still a powerhouse in manufacturing, and the output of the nation’s factories continues to rise."
But wait, I'm assured on FR (and pretty where everywhere else in American and non-American media, blogs and society in general) that we don't make anything any more, that we're also-rans industrially, even despite having an industrial sector that alone would be the third largest economy on the planet.
I have no problem with folk getting together to discuss the issue decades before it becomes an actual problem, mind you. But this article is just another in a very, very long line that vastly oversimplifies the issue (not just the problem) and provides little beyond Ominousspeak.
A perfect example. The NV Philips company of the Netherlands invented the CD and the CD player. They still manufacture these things, and they make an enormous amount of money from the sales of CDs and players and from licensing the manufacturing rights to other companies. They can continue to innovate because they know how to research, engineer, and produce the machinery.
This outsourcing can work with really high volume durable goods or throw away stuff. The problem comes when the cookie cutter MBA's try to shoe horn every industry into the management fad of the day while never even glancing up from the spread sheet.
But they don't manufacture them.
Unions are only part of the problem.
Of the 3 companies that I worked for that sent their labor overseas, none were union.
It is all about the cost of production, labor unioned or not, the cost of production is all that matters.
Wisconsin is full of manufacturers. My little town and its surrounding area has foundrys, finishers, wood/paper mills, furniture and window manufacturers and a hugh HVAC factory. We have a shortage of welders up here.
tarriffs
fair trade
eliminate foreign trade deficeits
In the 80's the Japanese were going to own us.
Not.
Already American society is re-organizing to cope with a declining standard of living. Young people are taking longer to leave home, if they ever do. Out of financial necessity, it will become common for multiple generations to live in the same house, reverting to the historical pre-World War II norm.
Increasingly, many will never own a home, spending a lifetime in an apartment or trailer. Squatting and shanty towns will become ubiquitous. Violence will spread, as the new white underclass clashes with Hispanic immigrants. For the first time in our history, children will be worse off than their parents, grandchildren even moreso.
Of course, none of this applies to the elites. The global and historical norm is for a tiny, super-wealthy oligarchy to rule over a massive underclass -- America was the greatest exception in history. Now, America will simply revert to the economic and social conditions that have been normal all over the world, for thousands of years of human history.
IMO.
By any economic measure we are wealther now than ever before in history.
A graph of the DJIA from 1900 to 2004.
This supports your statement DB.
Yes, they do. They also manufacture refrigerators, TVs, electric shavers (Norelco), light bulbs, and other stuff.
Some things are still 100% made in the USA. 
These "two or three people" WOULD NOT BE THERE without many others around. Top experts do not exist in vacuum, same way as you cannot have movie industry making only "two or three" blockbusters. You need the whole social environment for that, starting with the ENTRY LEVEL jobs for the FUTURE leaders (they do not leap out of Zeus head like goddess Athena did).
There will ALWAYS be people in the USA that will be able to make anything.
Really? Or maybe you do not need even that?
"Let London manufacture those fine fabrics of hers to her heart's content; let Holland her chambrays; Florence her cloth; the Indies their beaver and vicuna; Milan her brocade, Italy and Flanders their linens...so long as our capital can enjoy them; the only thing it proves is that all nations train their journeymen for Madrid, and that Madrid is the queen of Parliaments, for all the world serves her and she serves nobody."
(Prominent Spanish official - Alfonso Nunez de Castro in 1675)
The fact is we are so wealthy that we feel like we can spend endless sums of money all kinds of feel good things in endless regulation. If life were a we bit harder we wouldn't have time or concern ourselves with the color of our neighbor's house or if he has a flag pole in the yard, etc.
You live near Schofield?
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