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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: neolib who wrote (53081)	3/11/2008 10:26:05 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 542303

My claim is that countries which have significant net exports, will have more robust manufacturing employment than countries like the USA which have significant net imports. That's not a claim I care much about. True or false, it doesn't concern me much. Robust overall employment, GDP per person, total compensation per average or median employee, yes those are all concerns. I don't care so much whether its manufacturing, services, even agriculture, except to the extent that such jobs aren't good for the trends I mention (for example economies that rely mostly on agricultural workers tend to be poor economies) If the USA shifts from manufacturing 100% of its own goods, to manufacturing 2/3's The relationship between the amount of manufactured goods produced in a country and the amount consumed, is unimportant in this context. The issue is the total production of goods manufactured in the US (or any other country). If consumer demand increases that doesn't mean manufacturing is shrinking (in fact it will probably increase). US manufacturing was in real terms keeps increasing. LOL! I'm not wanting to toss out any of them. I'd rather include ag workers in that list to get something meaningful. I look around my local community, and I'd guess there are at least 5 ag workers average for each farmer, and this is an area of small farms. Farmer doesn't mean "farm owner". Anyone who picks crops would be a farmer, and anyone who ranches or manages farmers would be in that 1.6mil figure as well. People who manufacture farm equipment or fertilizer would be manufacturing workers. What type of ag worker are you concerned about? In any case even if you do multiply the figure by 5 or even 10 times, it doesn't change the point. Agricultural employment has greatly declined as a percentage of US employment, or even in the 20th century in absolute terms in the US. We produce more and more with less and less. Manufacturing should follow a somewhat similar trend and in fact has already started to do so.