U.S. Manufacturing Losing The Battle

Sure, U.S. banking is in trouble, but the longer-term and possibly more damaging threat to the nation's prosperity is the decline of the manufacturing sector. Late last year, the number of U.S. manufacturing jobs dropped below 14 million for the first time since 1950. It's hard to find anything else that takes us back to a time before most baby boomers (remember them?) were even born. On top of that, the United States lost another 49,000 manufacturing jobs in April alone. Hard to believe, but the last factory built in this country may be something we'll see in our lifetime, or certainly that of our children.

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Despite all the bad news, the United States still has a manufacturing sector and still produces about $4.5 trillion worth of goods a year. But we're also consuming fewer and fewer of our own products each year, and factory workers' slice of the pie is getting smaller by the month. If we don't address this problem soon, the last thing we'll be producing in America may be paper. After all, we have abundant forests, clean water and a dedicated work force with generations of experience in the art of paper-making.

And yet, given all the downsides -- foreign companies raking in tax benefits and government subsidies, currency differentials that provide foreign exporters with a 40 percent break on their sales, complex trade laws -- why make anything in this country at all? It'd be easier to disassemble the paper mills, pack the equipment in enormous wooden crates and send it off to China -- probably on the same cargo ships that, in time, will carry massive rolls of paper back to our shores.