Thanks for the personal attack, dirtboy. It's generally the last resort of the argumentatively and intellectually challenged, and of those suffering from some form of denial.
America is, unfortunately, full of relatively uneducated people. The simple fact that a majority will sometimes vote Republican, against their own interests, should illustrate that fact. And those people need jobs to support themselves, and to make a contribution to society and to the economy, regardless of their other inadequacies. Manufacturing provided those jobs in many communities, particularly in small to medium cities in Red States.... and fueled the economies of those places. Ultimately, we'll have to deal with the really big question- does business serve the nation, or does the nation serve business? How does government shape that relationship to best serve the most Americans? Where's the balance point that maximizes results for everybody?
I understand how the world works- in a macro sense, people will fill whatever jobs are available within an economy, and what's available isn't necessarily very good on average. Individuals can move up within that system on the basis of education, hard work, experience, or just blind luck. It doesn't change the system itself, or the availability or pay rate of different jobs within a given economy. Improved education doesn't necessarily mean that there's a demand for it in the job market- ask all the Techies who got the old cornholio when the dotcom bubble burst... and what jobs remain were often offshored to India... Master's degree in computer technology? So What? That job pays $18K in Bangalore, and they do good work...
Manufacturing has unique advantages, in that it adds tremendous value in the process, some of which can be taken by workers as wages, some of which goes to their capitalist bosses. It also creates a whole chaiin of wealth in the distribution process, and in ancilliary businesses... Other endeavors in the service sector don't do this nearly as well, meaning that the split has to be different, and the fact that manufacturing and exportable service workers in emerging economies will work for nearly nothing skews the whole thing even further. Heck, mainland chinese will work so cheap that manufacturing processes automated in Taiwan and Singapore are done by hand on the mainland... brute force methodology, with minimum investment or technology... Great news for capitalists, good news for rural chinese who just fell off the turnip truck in Shanghai, and not necessarily good news for anybody else, at all...
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