The point that I was trying to make that you missed, is that corporate America isn't trying to make a better widget, corporate America is making money by investing money.
And more and more of those investments are going abroad where the widgets are made. No only are investments going abroad but the money is stating abroad to the tune 2.1 trillion dollars.
Get with the program! Money abroad is used to buy the widgets, ship them to the United States, then sell them to the public and be able to write off the cost without paying tax on the original money.
Yea, it's just great for Wall Street but not for America. We are becoming a nation that manufactures nothing and consumes everything.
We manufacture more products today than we did 20 years ago.
Another myth of the Left exploded.
Today, just under 12 million Americans work in manufacturing, down from a peak of nearly
20 million in the late 1970s. If US manufacturing had kept up with population growth we would have over 35 million manufacturing jobs.
Of course, the reason for the decrease in manufacturing jobs in the US is not just corporate investment abroad. Automation took a huge toll in manufacturing. Also the wage differential between US and many other nations was responsible for losses not just in manufacturing but in many sectors. Who's going to pay ten or fifteen dollars an hour for workers in the US to manufacture widgets when it can done in 3rd world countries for two dollars and hour?
In the second half of the 20th century when first automation and then foreign competition took away jobs, we were told don't worry. New technology and better education would tip the scales in favor of American workers and there would be plenty of jobs and not just jobs but much better jobs with higher pay. What a lot of B.S. that was. High school students that had little or no aptitude for college filled the rolls of colleges across the country driving college cost up and the quality down. As a result we have millions of people that were best suited for working in semiskilled jobs that now have college degrees, a ton of college loan debt, and low paying dead end jobs.
Has U.S. manufacturing s comeback stalled