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U.S. Manufacturing still depressed

The declining fortunes of American manufacturing are being belatedly understood. In February, the New York Analysis of Policy & Government  reported that:

U.S. manufacturing is in a state of crisis…The January 2015 report from the Federal Reserve notes that there are fewer jobs in that industry than at the start of the Obama presidency, when there was 12,561,000 manufacturing jobs in the nation.  By January of 2015, that number had been reduced to 12,330,000. The crisis has its antecedents long before President Obama took office, during the tenure of President Clinton. In October 0f 2000, Clinton signed legislation granting permanent normal trade relations to China. The measure had been bitterly opposed by conservatives, human rights groups, and unions.

In several reports, the Information, Technology & Information Technology Foundation (ITIF) organization has revealed how deep the U.S. manufacturing crisis is, and how little notice the problem has received. A prior study reported:

“In the 2000s, U.S. manufacturing suffered its worst performance in American history in terms of jobs. Not only did America lose 5.7 million manufacturing jobs, but the decline as a share of total manufacturing jobs (33 percent) exceeded the rate of loss in the Great Depression. Despite this unprecedented negative performance, most economists, pundits and elected officials remain remarkably blasé about what has transpired. Manufacturing, they argue, has simply become incredibly productive. While tough on workers who are laid off, outsized job losses actually indicate superior performance. All that might be needed are better programs to help laid-off production workers. And there is certainly no need for a determined national manufacturing competitiveness strategy.

“The alarm bells are largely silent for two reasons. First, most economists and pundits do not extend their analysis beyond one macro-level number—change in real manufacturing value-added relative to real GDP—which at first glance appears stable. But this number masks real decline in many industries. In 2010, 13 of the 19 U.S. manufacturing sectors (employing 55 percent of manufacturing workers) were producing less than in 2000.
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“Second, and more fundamentally, U.S. government statistics significantly overstate the change in U.S. manufacturing output, and by definition productivity, in part because of massive overestimation of output growth in the computer and electronics sector and because of problems with how manufacturing imports are measured. When measured properly, U.S. manufacturing output actually fell 11 percent over the last decade while GDP increased 17 percent, something that has not happened before, at least since WWII.”

“In a report released this year, ITIF notes that “American manufacturing has still not recovered to 2007 output or employment levels.  Moreover, the lion’s share of growth that has occurred appears to have been driven by a cyclical, rather than structural, recovery, and as such may represent only a temporary trend…for years, many think tanks,scholars, and pundits turned a blind eye towards the severity of U.S. manufacturing decline, preferring to believe that manufacturing loss is either natural or inconsequential.”

The effect on employment has been harsh.  Real Clear Markets reports:

“Focusing on the last decade, the BLS employment data offer a sobering perspective on the manufacturing sector’s growth in employment in recent years. Between 2010-2014, 762,000 new U.S. manufacturing jobs were created over that five-year period, at an annual average rate of 152,400 new jobs. In contrast, during the preceding five-year period (2005 to 2009), 2.8 million manufacturing jobs were lost in the U.S. economy, or an average decline of 562,200 jobs per year. Placed in perspective, this means that only 762,000 and about 27 percent of the 2.8 million manufacturing jobs lost during the five years between 2005 and 2009 were actually recovered in the last five years (2010-2014) of economic recovery. And compared to the start of the Great Recession, American manufacturers employ 1.4 million fewer factory workers today than in December 2007…In September 2012, President Obama announced a national goal to create 1 million new manufacturing positions by the end of 2016. Since that announcement, the US manufacturing sector has created payroll jobs at a rate of only 11,000 per month and fewer than 300,000 jobs in total over the last 27 months. That rate of factory job creation would generate only about 560,000 new jobs by the time Obama leaves office — a 440,000 job shortfall compared to the president’s unrealistic goal of 1 million new factory jobs by the end of next year.”