the economy and our country Need Rethinking (the lower case was chosen on purpose)

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American Manufacturing Jobs Rebounding
Image by Speaker Pelosi via Flickr

I have been trying to keep my politics out of this blog.  If you don’t know me, you have NO idea how hard this is for me.  And, I am not really going to break that rule, but it may strain those confines a little right now.

I was listening to Morning Joe (the absolutely best news discussion program on TV, hands down; Charlie Rose is probably second) when I heard Mayor Bloomberg make a statement that made me stop dead in my tracks earlier this week.   Now, I have a great deal of respect for the Mayor (one of the few NY Mayors to earn that in four decades), but I really thought he was exaggerating.  He wasn’t.  [OK, maybe just a little.]

Michael Bloomberg said that 10% of the private job growth in the US was in New York City.  Let me repeat the actual facts:  Of all the new jobs created in the US in 2010, 8.8% of them were created in New York City (67000 NYC and 736000 US) .  When you couple that with the fact that the metropolitan DC area had about 2% of the total private sector growth, you can see that private sector employment for the rest of the US is barely moving up at all.

It also points to the depletion of our manufacturing base in America.  Neither of these two regions are hotbeds for manufacturing; as a matter of fact, they generally are hotbeds for office jobs.  And, yes, our manufacturing base has dropped from 22 to 10% of total employment this past decade.  (While part of the drop was due to the Great Recession, the trend was clearly definite throughout the decade.)

I don’t care what your politics are (OK, I do- really), but this is a real problem.  Our politicians have to stop running for office (every minute of the day) and start working together to solve this problem.  I have started a feasibility study for a new venture, a small manufacturing firm.  It won’t employ thousands, but ten is a good start.  All of us so talented individuals should consider what effort they can contribute to restore American competency and strategic advantages.

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One thought on “the economy and our country Need Rethinking (the lower case was chosen on purpose)”

  1. Charlie Rose is great. I especially like his ‘Brain’ series.

    Politics is no way to run a country. I do not have the solution. But the empirical method seems to be a good idea.

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