"The only choice we seem able to make anymore is the choice not to make anything."
"American manufacturing output is larger than ever"
Which is it?
"American manufacturing output is larger than ever"
Which is it?
We've lost zero manufacturing capability.
We just need a fraction of the people that used to be involved - they've been replaced by robots.
"The job at the plant" died, not the manufacturing sector.
People with direct experience of the manufacturing sector in the US and abroad (including me) will certainly tell you that America's capabilities have deteriorated, at least relative to other countries. The machine tool industry is considered a good bellwether for industrial capacity and there's been some good research on this topic if you're interested: http://www.bismarckanalysis.com/Machine_Tools_Case_Study.pdf
Edit -- by comparison, when I lived in Japan I found it extraordinarily easy to buy locally made products of all sorts; pots and pans, coffee mugs, water bottles, stationery, clothes, shoes, electronics, tools, injection molded plastic items, paper products, everything. Even in their equivalent of dollar stores. Sometimes they were a bit more expensive than those produced in China/Vietnam/Indonesia, but often they were price competitive. It was weird coming back to North America and adapting to not being able to find anything locally made.
We don't build low margin anything because nobody would buy it if it costs more.
Japan is a good example - they setup all their car factories in the US in the South specifically to avoid union labor costs! Many Japanese cars, for our market, are made... Right here! Because the shipping and labor overhead would make them uncompetitive.
Fighter jets are almost a cost-is-no-object project, so to me at least, it isn't a good proxy for a country's manufacturing prowess.
Your ability to build something is measured by how cheaply you can build that thing. This means that if I can make something more cheaply than you can, I'm actually better at making it than you are, assuming the end product is the same. (You can also cheapen something by cutting corners on the design or materials, but then you're making a different thing).
Can we make an iPhone? Yeah, we design not only the chips here but the circuit boards. They're prototyped here!
Can we increase our margins by throwing the chemicals into the local river and having people manually stand there for 12 hour shifts breathing in toxic chemicals to manually polish them? Yup.