You may have heard dire claims that the United States “doesn’t make anything anymore” – that our nation has shipped so many manufacturing jobs overseas that it’s no longer possible to “buy American.” Fortunately, those claims aren’t correct.
Yes, a lot of jobs – usually those requiring little skill and earning lower pay – have been sent overseas where production costs are lower and environmental regulations are lax. But suppose you had to guess what country today has the world’s greatest manufacturing output. You might assume it’s Communist China, or maybe India, or Japan. But in fact, that honor still belongs to the United States – by a long shot!
Our country, with about 300 million people, vastly out-produces the second-biggest manufacturing country, Communist China. “U.S. manufacturers cranked out nearly $1.7 trillion in goods in 2009,” The Associated Press reported. That is nearly half again the output of China, which has four times as many people as the United States.
And as Volkswagen’s decision to build a production facility in Chattanooga shows, higher-skilled jobs – with higher pay – are still being created here. In fact, the 136,000 manufacturing jobs created in the United States in 2010 represented the first net increase in those jobs since 1997.
In many cases, of course, jobs have been lost here not because they have gone abroad but because manufacturing processes have become much more efficient, requiring fewer employees.