Let me start by saying that I enjoy manufacturing. While I work in Quality, I enjoy working with processes and the facilities, utilities and equipment that act together to realize product design. Reviewing the engineering or a P&ID (Piping and Instrument Diagram) that is at the heart of a unit operation and thinking how I will test it to build upon R&D to measure, demonstrate and communicate process robustness still challenges and energizes me.
Anyway, yesterday Paul Krugman published an Op-Ed titled Making Things in America. More than anything that green-shoot economists can tell me, this lifts my spirits.
Americans are, once again, starting to actually make things. And we’re doing that thanks, in large part, to the fact that the Fed and the Obama administration ignored very bad advice from right-wingers — ideologues who still, in the face of all the evidence, claim to know something about creating prosperity.
That is the gist of it. While wages for the jobs being created are low and we still have a long road ahead of us, the conditions are being created to make it less profitable to import. Right Wing, Financial Casino and Corporatist ideology is demonstrated once again to be bankrupt. A strong dollar and unregulated trade and finance does not lead to prosperity for American workers. Those are only weapons in the cultural war waged against us, those of us who find satisfaction in labor, by the plutocracy.
First, what’s driving the turnaround in our manufacturing trade? The main answer is that the U.S. dollar has fallen against other currencies, helping give U.S.-based manufacturing a cost advantage. A weaker dollar, it turns out, was just what U.S. industry needed.
My view, reading Krugman, is that there never was a thing called the "post industrial economy." It was a mirage, sold to rubes by right wing hawkers to allow the pickpockets to work freely.
Now, if we can push a coordinated approach to trade, industrial policy, and taxation perhaps Americans can start to manufacture things again. While I think the nature of our political parties argues against it, I can only hope.