Thanks to Steve Feinstein for bringing the article about American manufacturing by Michael J. Hicks at Ball State University to our attention, thereby providing an opportunity to debunk some claims made in Hicks's piece.
Hicks claims the following:
No matter how you measure it, 2015 was a record year for manufacturing production in the U.S. Even with the last few rocky few [sic] months, we are still at record production. There's no ambiguity on this. I think inflation-adjusted dollars are the best measure, but any available metric – nominal or real GDP, industrial production indexes, quality indexes – reveals the same trend. U.S. manufacturing production is booming; we're just doing it with far fewer workers.
Here is a plot of inflation-adjusted value-added manufacturing output in the U.S. since records began in 1947:
Since 2000, real manufacturing production has increased 1.0% in the United States. Over 15 years! That is an annualized rate of growth of less than 0.1%. Even Barack Obama's economic growth rate is an order of magnitude greater than that, and I doubt anyone reasonable would classify that as "booming."
The reality is that U.S. manufacturing is going nowhere.
Hicks goes on to claim that "[t]he high-end estimates are that today we have lost 1.4 million manufacturing jobs across the nation since the 1970s because of foreign trade. My published estimates are closer to 750,000."
Here are the number of manufacturing employees in the U.S. since 1939:
http://admin.americanthinker.com/images/bucket/2016-05/196543_5_.jpg
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2016/05/the_us_manufacturing_sector_is_getting_killed.html
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