Well, that's been the Republican party line since Reagan in any case. However, it doesn't hold water. Exactly which jobs pay better and require more skill than manufacturing, and which has the highest blue collar wages?

Sending manufacturing overseas is a fad de jour. Once the true hidden costs are evident, there will be the inevitable backlash. Michael E. Porter of the Harvard Business School, and leading world authority on competitive strategy and the competitiveness and economic development of nations, made the same prediction yet again just last week during an interview with Charlie Rose at Harvard. US companies are currently obsessed with share price, not with return on investment as they should be, and one consequence is that they are making poor strategic decisions.

Aside from being nearly 20% of the economy, and representing high value added, manufacturing jobs also pay considerably more than any other blue collar sector. For that matter, tool makers, mold makers, job setters and the legions of technicians that run all the computerized machinery in modern plants are often paid more than senior electronics engineers and programmers simply due to their scarcity and the value of their output. In the real world it's digital electronics engineers and programmers that are a dime a dozen, and competent manufacturing techs that are rare and expensive.

Were the theories de jour correct, are we to suppose multinationals like Siemens, Krup, Bosch, Saint-Gobain,Theiss, Fuji, Toyo, HSK, NTN Bearing, Bridgestone, Michelin, BMW, Daimler Benz who are investing heavily in US manufacturing plants must simply be misguided and ignorant? We even had a Chinese company purchase a Federal Mogul camshaft plant in Jackson, Michigan last year. What were they thinking? Guess they don't know that labor rates are cheaper in China, eh?

The truth is that US industrial productivity is the highest in the world, and the labor rates, relative to productivity, are actually quite favorable. These companies, and many more, have located here and are profitable. What we really lack is competent management personnel.

Add to that the fact that much of manufacturing is strategically important, at least according the CIA's annual summary every year since 1983. How do you propose we conduct future military adventures when the components the military needs to operate are sourced from countries that might decide they are opposed to our foreign policy? I'm not willing to roll the dice and take that chance.

oc