Man I miss those UAW car doors that never shut right. lolSorry, I said 80 percent of manufacturing jobs were lost to automation.
It's 88 percent.
http://conexus.cberdata.org/files/MfgReality.pdf
Almost 88 percent of job losses in manufacturing in recent years can be attributable to productivity growth, and the long-term changes to manufacturing employment are mostly linked to the productivity of American factories.
As for why we aren't producing products here, we are! We are manufacturing more goods than ever before.
Auto manufacturing 40 years ago. You can see at least a dozen humans in the photo working on four cars:
Auto manufacturing today. Spot the two humans in this photo. What are they doing?
But until the gop supply side tax cuts of the past 20 years, there was no reason the US econ could not have supported child and medical care for a two parent family making careers in retail.