What's happened to all the manufacturing jobs?

Well back before our schools were used for indoctrination by the left ( 1960's) we were taught economics in high school. In college we took economic classes for three credit units and that's what we were taught.

The American GDP use to be based upon the production of durable goods not on how many burgers were flipped or how many toilets were cleaned.

 

Totally irrelevant as regards measuring GDP. In fact, GDP has always been changing its structure since the dawn of the nation because what it measures is always changing ...

PS: This might help you understand how GDP is formulated:
Measuring the Economy 1 - excerpt:

 

You are catching on. How the GDP is measured all depends what era you are referring too and what country you are referring too.

From 1940 until globalization when America's industrial base was sent over seas, America's GDP was based upon the production of durable goods.

 

Your comment is irrelevant in response to my comment.

All I pointed out was that manufacturing has increased while the jobs needed decreased. What used to require 10-12 people now requires 2 or 3. Bringing back those manufacturing capabilities to the US will not bring back jobs. ESPECIALLY jobs that place those workers in the upper middle class.

 

JET SPEED

Yes, I agree. Wow!

In the US, Manufacturing barely makes up 8% of all jobs in America. "Services" now have the lion's share of jobs. (Which is unfortunate because if you look at average wages between the two sectors, they are much lower for the Services Sector.

See that verified here (Employment by Major Industry Sector - BLS, Table 2.1):
Employment by major industry sector:
* 12.7% - Goods producing (of which Manufacturing is 8.1%)
* 80.1% - Services providing
* 1.4% - Agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting
* 5.7% - Non-agricultural self-employed

My Point: We have grown up in a nation thinking that "our kids will do better than we parents". Used to be correct, when the US was the only poker-game in town. That time has long since past.

The Information Age (based upon "Services") started in the 1960s with the advent of powerful computers and data-banks. Then it switched to super-speed in the early 1990s when Tim Burners-Lee (a Brit) at CERN created the foundational basics of Internet Usage (which is indexing words so they are searchable and retrievable in their context).

The world has been running at jet-speed ever since ...

 

CUPIDITY

Our "industrial base" was sent nowhere. It degraded all by itself because of the influence of foreign competition.

Where it remains strong is in Very Hi-tech Products for which the US has maintained a competitive edge by means of innovation and investment. (As well as Demand for such products long before they become popular elsewhere. In this niche, the rest of the world is pretty much "monkey-see, monkey-do".)

Uncle Sam was sitting on his laurels after WW2 and the rest of the industrialized world rebuilt itself. To the point that, in traditional industries (like making cars), it could compete with America that was not investing enough to improve competitivity.

Why did that happen? This my observation, and purely personal: The US become hypnotized with generating Income that, with stoopidly low-taxation created Wealth. It's accent became upon profit, profit, profit in a wild scramble to make millions quickly. Which led inevitably to "short-cuts" like the sub-prime mess, into which Uncle Sam dived stumbling-'n-mumbling as it provoked the Great Recession.

What happened happened - and right under our noses. And we still have yet to learn the lesson. Donald Dork will change nothing in terms of that destructive mentality.

We have nobody else to blame but our own cupidity ...

 

I'll respond and move along as I desire...not as you prefer.

You obviously refuse to look at the reality of this issue which is fine with me but just tell me you prefer diatribe over reality...

 

Then don't make comments here that infer you lack knowledge...

 

Piffle 'n drivel, drivel 'n piffle.

Moving right along ...

 

See? We hear about how dreadful it is that our country is being torn apart by intolerance and partisan divisions. And here is an example of why it's happening. The left didn't take over schools for indoctrination. The schools have always taught what was needed by industry. Students were always trained to become educated, useful workers. In order to hold a job and produce for the company, we didn't need education in literature, the history of fascism, or democracy, and eventually the arts were also dropped. This was done to produce worker for capitalism more efficiently. The "left" had nothing to do with it. That is a tinfoil hat conspiracy theory. And that is a big source of the division and insanity most find so objectionable.

 

The left is only concerned with three things when it comes to education.

#1. Teachers union dues to be transferred to the DNC.

#2. Funding teachers pension programs usually using taxpayers money.

#3. Political indoctrination in political correctness.

 

Bollocks again, with the supercilious one-liners. Small minds think that hairy-problems can be reduced to simplistic statements. They can't.

Go find the Dept. of Education data yourself, find the percentage of high-school students who are graduating finally with a postsecondary education degree that is necessary for a good-job at good-pay in an economy where all the base-level jobs have long since fled to the Far East. (It's less than half of them.)

And they aint comin' back!

And what the hell is the beef about using "taxpayer money" to fund education? We do that for High Schools, don't we? Well, a secondary-school degree is no longer sufficient in this Brave New World of ours (post Great Recession).

And what the tiny, tiny minds now in control of "LaLaLand on the Potomac" are doing is to spend more money on DoD, which we need like bad-breath, and no extra-money at all on Education (which we need badly).

We shot ourselves collectively in the foot when we elected Hillary in the popular vote but not the Electoral College because she had taken Bernie's idea of funding postsecondary schooling for all families below a minimum wage of $100K. If that had worked, then maybe not 53% of our high-school graduates would be obtaining a postsecondary professional diploma but 80%!

Donald Dork is going to create jobs? Where? Trump Enterprises?

We are at an Unemployment Rate of just below 5% (and we've been there for at least 18 months). Which is around our recent long-term historic minimum. Where are the new jobs going to come from if not people with a postsecondary education and the advanced skills that such a level affords them.

Where? Huh? Where ... ?

 

Yes, it takes less people to make products due to machines, than it did at one time. But the jobs sent to slave wages to max out profits, were jobs humans did, using machines. Most of these were living wage jobs, and were not replaced by robots in china.

All that it takes for those jobs to come back is for a choice to be made by gov't which would bring them back, with living wages being paid again for these jobs. Offshoring American labor did not come down from some great god of economics. It was a human decision, not a command from the god of economics. Human decisions can be reversed.

Free trade, the device used to offshore to slave wages, exploiting poor people, from the big picture does not benefit anyone but owners and investors. We have free trade because that is what big banks and MNCs wanted, with banking driving it. To complicate it more than this is a ruse to keep it. We need to move back to the trade philosophy of our Founders, who saw America as an entity which mattered more than the interests of few rich men. So we protected our own from slave wages, for slave wages are not new, but very old. They existed when this nation was founded. We just did not force our workers or business to compete with it. For it is a dive to the bottom for everyone but specific owners. And we would have never built our powerful manufacturing sector which won us ww2, with free trade, offshoring. We never needed the rest of the world to export to in order to have a healthy economy. And importing things we could use our own workforce to make insures optimum employment will not happen.

 

So let the government make that "decision." Bring those plants back to the US. Raise prices on basic commodities like clothes. China will stop shipping your BVDs to the US and you'll pay twice as much for the same product. Then China will respond by limiting sales of US made product in China and now we have a giant Inflation/Recession custerfluck.

I feel for people who've been left behind by technology. The jobs they had will never exist again or, at least, will never exist at much more than subsistence levels. I want to try to retrain them to make them productive and employable in today's economy. But, to say to them that you will restore their previous income levels by forcing companies to make bad business decisions is dishonest.

 

Government liberals destroyed the American auto industry via regulations imposed faster than possible technological advancement ability, leading to nearly 2 decades of there being no choice but for Detroit to build and sell cars that looked like and drove like crap. Between safety bumpers (that protected no one and only because the insurance industry demanded it) and impossible to meet environmental standards pushing vehicle horsepower, fuel economy and reliability thru the floor, the American auto industry was obliterated. Added to this was the environmentalists blocking new oil exploration, causing fuel prices to skyrocket - killing American production of full sized cars.

As long as people were being forced to buy crappy cars and the government driving fuel prices up to radical degrees - even fuel outages, then they might as well buy cheap little crappy imports - which is exactly what happened.

As for education, liberalism 1.) convinced students they did not need to learn any marketable trade but rather should pursue liberal enlightenment and
2.) American university liberals decided it was more cool to have foreign students than American students - which also is what international corporations wanted too as they needed some foreign experts for their foreign sweatshop factories.

American liberals and liberalism ran American manufacturing and industry into the ground quite deliberately.

 

The right is only concerned with one thing when it comes to corporate politics: ZERO taxes.
http://nyti.ms/2mnMRli

 

Living beings have two basic concerns, security and comfort. Relative global border security created by the conviction recently crystallized in the mind of mankind, that conquering others is a losing proposition in the long run, has made nations feel more secure within their borders. This has allowed nations to shift more energy towards material gains. To achieve high values for the participants, international division of labor is inevitable, which cannot flourish without massive international trade. As a result, and supported by the fast and massive communication and transportation facilities, the tide of international trade is rising. Thus, progression of economic globalization is an undefeatable factor of today’s life. Today’s fast and massive commodity/information exchange all over the world is merging the cultures of the world at an accelerating pace.
We have to keep gravitating towards high value items to keep leading the procession. That means our modes of operations have to keep changing. The gap between the developed and under developed economies is shrinking. But the world as a whole would achieve more affluence. Our roll of being the super entity will go on receding. But we will achieve more material abundance in this process, and we will have to be satisfied with that situation.

 

Quite right - and I hope the youth of America put down their smartphones long enough to understand that this "Information Age" in advanced economies find themselves is not going to be needing unqualified/unskilled workers.

Job creation and higher salaries will be available overwhelmingly for only those who have the necessary qualifications provided by post-secondary educational schooling ...

 

Pathetic simplification of an extremely complex historical evolution from the Industrial Age to the Information Age that no country today can or will escape.

Which is the how and why a dunderhead Donald Dork got elected by fools who swallowed his lies hook, line and sinker. The dork cannot and therefore will not recreate the jobs lost because they started to leave the US in droves well over two decades ago.

The jobs now being created are of a far higher caliber for which postsecondary educations will be an absolutely necessary requirement ...

 

Highly trained people in fields not easily shipped overseas like welding, plumbing, engine repair and the like will be in great demand and receive good salaries. Not everyone has to go to college but everyone does need skills.

 

Baloney. Greed destroyed it. They were making a profit but they decided to abandon the workers who had made them great and move to where they could get cheaper labor. That was the cause of Detroit degenerating into disaster.

 

That and the natural evolution of capitalism to the current crisis that is developing fast in which consumption (demand) is inadequate to keep capitalism healthy and robust, so the "answer" is to cut every social program they can in order to compensate for massive corporate and corporate elite tax cuts and subsidies. That plus mergers and automation will maintain corporate profits for a while. But what happens when even that isn't good enough and they can't cut any more programs? That's when the attack on our savings accounts, IRAs, and pensions will begin and will be backed up by jackboots in the night and slave labor for us in their prisons.

 

What happens to the incomes when more of those unemployed, non-college people get trained in welding, plumbing, engine repair and the like?

The problem here is in waiting for the establishment to produce a solution for us. We will find it is up to us to do it.

 

The ones with good skills will get good salaries. The ones without ...not so much.

Just as everyone is not cut out for college, not everyone is cut out to be a welder or other skilled crafts.

 

You didn't grasp my question.

The problem is unemployment created by moving jobs overseas, right? That was the point of your own post in #145. Don't you believe in supply and demand effects on employment and wages?