Enough ranting! Now the last industries on the block are in play! Let’s see the pharm companies had the politicians sign a law that said you can’t buy pills from Canada. These companies are the last ones kicking back right? Hell they have the same pills in Canada! Market protection? Health Care insurance protection. Hay! why can’t I deduct every dollar I spend on health care 1 for 1 on my taxes today. Isn’t the goverment worried about their citizens health needs. Oh! I understand! that’s what my 401K plan is for. After I am broke then the gov. will give me something. Funny! if I never wanted to work, even in good times, I will end up the same as the 12 children welfare families. Hell thier kids go to college for free and I can’t even get my own tax free account to save for mine.

Remember when you spit out and say industrial output you better put in actual dollars of product made here (includes usa components) and adjust for inflation over 30 years then compare it to the market segment overall value to get your percent.

One last thing! Service is just that service! Those called soft products. Soft product usually services hard products. Hard product you added value to when you sale, then and only then can soft product make $. This country is the big dog now. but when we can’t buy anymore watch out! No one is going to care how many jets and tanks we have. They will be dictating to us.

Tell me somthing? What do you think I will cut out first since I am out of work. Cell phone service, less insurance, less going out to eat, put up an old time TV antenna. I have to fix my car but I don’t need a new computer?

I remember when Japanese cars came to the usa. Junk! then the Jap government gave them $ to retool 5X over to get it right. Us? we had the bean counters in Detroit looking at the quarterly gamble on wall street running Detroit “not the engineers”. Did you ever hear anyone say go out and buy BMW stock or Toyota stock to make $? Did you know that GM makes half of BMW’s transmissions. Don’t worry they will import from China with 150K mile warrenty bumper to bumper. Did the UAW get out of control yes! But are they also the reason anyone working today has health care insurance “yes”.

When ever you have a transfer of industrial power going to other countries you sold it off for geo-political influence, or some special interest group took a cut. Remember when you call in for your unemployment benifits don’t press one for spanish!

Ya! Ross Parot was right in the debate on TV. The great sucking sound of jobs happen and it will take 8 to 10 years to get some of it back.

We need some very smart business people back in Washington and I don’t mean bankers. When the third generation young poor black guy yells, listen to him. Someone work in automotive that’s way he’s north, but that someone could stand on his feet and make a living. Now your telling him to work in service right. What service McDonald’s? What the hell do you thing is going to happen.

This recession is being played by the media as a hiccup. This depression will last a long time unless we get back industry. No rich country in the world can be rich without industry. By the term rich, I mean strong middle class buying power.

One of the big reason industry has servived in Europe is that they do invest heavy in automation and the goverments ease the burden of the investment. I have to laugh when the southern congressmen say let Detroit go under. They get the off shore companies free land freed buildings free roads and no taxes for 10 years. I think one of the Toyota plants just came do on the 10 years and they said they were going to move unless they got another 10 years. Way not tariff the importers that give workers free gov. heath and the other gov. social free benifits. Yes import tariff would run about 3 to 5 thousand per car. Is not that free and fair trade? At least Parot would have gotten it right would have never made deals for other countries to sell here unless we had the better deal for our workforce and companies. Not us. Our politicans come cheap!

The only thing to due is vote every politician out. and put in new ones. Keep doing it until they get the hint. Continuity? Do you really think anyone scared for their job or losing a house really cares? Also, give them the cheapest HMO. Remember we are the investors! Only we know whats good for our politicians.

First of all, youth employment is high because no business owner in their right mind is going to give some barely literate, disrespectful, moronic dumbass public-school educated doofus a job at $7.40/hour, when they can employ a man or woman who is looking for a part-time job to supplement their family incomes.

Secondly, to paraphrase John Galt in Atlas Shrugged, "there's no such thing as meaningless work, only meaningless people who refuse to do it."

Thirdly, I wonder exactly where Fritz lives, because it is obvious from his comment that he is either stupid or lives somewhere that is run by socialist politicians who have driven all the business out of the area. In most communities, and I do mean MOST, there is such a thing as "an industrial park" that usually has anywhere from 2 to 12 manufacturers in it. It is true that many of them are small, and have less than 100 employees, but truth is, America was built on, and continues to thrive on, small business, that typically employs less than 100 people.

With the internet, and the public funding of libraries, there's no excuse for people to be this stupid when it comes to economics. Before you speak again and prove to all involved what a moron you are, try reading something other than the local UAW rag, put out by people who have no clue about economics.

People don't just need jobs. They need jobs that provide meaningful work that will provide a reasonable standard of living for their efforts.

If I lived in a ghetto, I'd sell drugs and shoot it out with rival gangs, too. At least I'd have my pride. How much self-esteem can someone derive from being a Walmart greeter?

You can't become rich without becoming more skilled. Period.

The US still beats most OECD countries on labor force participation, despite recent US decreases.

However it is true that youth unemployment (not labor force participation, but people 18-25 who want to work) is high. US black youth unemployment is about 26%. Reasons are probably a combination of minimum wage, poor performance by public schools, and the drug war.

Hey, I want some of those crappy dollars! If you got any of those nasty dollars cluttering up your commune Susan, send em my way!

McDonalds
Wal-Mart
Home Depot

It bothers me a bit that so many conservatives are dismissive of most blue collar workers. Many of you are only a generation or two removed from a shovel.

So we can outsource the actual low value added/low wage manufacturing, show a trade deficit in manufacturing as a result, and not truly be hollowing out America. Putting things together in a mind-numbingly repetitive process isn't really that good of a job, although unions have managed to coerce the pay of such workers far more than supply/demand factors would ordinarily warrant. They are also coercing themselves out of jobs at places like GM and Ford while others open up new factories in right-to-work states.

Comment on Spencer's post and its follow-up.

The reason that the Fed constantly re-weights the relative importance of industries lies in the whole controversy about chain-weighting.

The problem arises when you have great disparities in growth rates between industries, with relatively small industries showing very, very strong growth rates (US semiconductors, for instance, growing 25% per annum in terms of volume) and the rest of the industries growing ca 5%.

If you keep constant year values and volumes, as economists like to, then within a reasonably short period of time (4-5 years) you end up with absurd statistics, like having the semiconductor industry accounting for 95% or more of total US industry output.

Hence the Fed's move to chain-weighting the industrial statistics and to take the extreme position of changing the weights every month.

Makes life kinda hard for statisticians and economists, but it really does remove the kind of massive hedonic distortion that really typifies high technology, short product cycle and high productivity industries like semiconductor manufacturing. The adjustments made give a better picture, in real terms, of how important any given industry is for the US economy at that given point in time, which is what politicians demand to know from the Fed.

The US consistently runs a large trade surplus in food, not a deficit.

Josh: someone who doesn't wish to improve his skill sets, well, deserves to be left behind. 99 is completely right that there are plenty of opportunities out there, if someone is willing to work hard and improve himself.

Actually we don't have to manufacture goods for export in order to exchange them for other goods. We just need to trade money for those imports. And we create new money ourselves. I mean this:

- Scoop some dirt, rocks, and wood out of the ground, and slap it all together to construct a building.
- Sell ownership of that pile of reformatted dirt to a foreign entity. For money.
- Now we have money, which we can trade for imported manufactured goods.
- I suppose some of what went on here may have counted as "manufacturing", but most of the value created is in design, construction, and real estate expertise. In any case, no material good is exported.

- We transfer title of an asset to foreign ownership, but who cares? The asset did not even previously exist. We "lose" nothing but dirt and labor. The dirt and labor come together to create wealth, which is exchanged for imported goods.

I don't see a problem with any of this.

There are plenty of service jobs that do this, too, and don't require a college degree. One could work as an auto mechanic, or as a carpenter, or as a landscaper, or car saleman, or realtor. I believe today's economy easily creates much more opportunity, and many more varied, interesting and well-paying jobs, that the "golden era" of yesterday. While it is true that there may be many fewer well-paying manufacturing jobs than in, say, 1960, previous generations had to deal with similar dramatic drop in previous "staples" of American labor such as skilled artisan jobs, or the shopkeeping trade, or small scale farming.

I think much of the problem with the precariousness of the living standards and economic security of the non-white collar elites in America has to do with government policies that have made three "deal-breaker" necessities, healthcare, quality housing, and quality public education, a lot more expensive than they need be. In other words I think the problem is not so much on the wage side as on the ***cost*** side (and I blame Really Stupid Government Policies for this).

One thing that always struck me about the "the basis of wealth is making things" (or, many years ago "growing things") argument is the great fluidity between agriculture, manufacturing, and services. I mean, agriculture and manufacturing are the same thing. Both cases involve using brainpower and tools to convert nature's bounty into something people can use. But when you think about it, this is also what services are. If I agree to grind your wheat into flour, am I engaging in manufacturing, or am I performing a service for you? I guess it depends on how we structure the transaction. But the point is it's just a matter of how we describe it.

- Josh