Chomsky - Jobs aren't coming back

I don't know why I keep bothering to point this out, but the notion that "America no longer makes things" is absolutely, empirically, unassailably false.<p>See this: <a href="http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/OUTMS" rel="nofollow">http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/OUTMS</a><p>And a prior discussion of the topic.<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3803022" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3803022</a><p>Anybody who starts a discussion decrying the death of manufacturing in America is selling you something, and it's not a manufacturing job.<p>Sidebar: This quote!<p>"The workforce and the union offered to buy it, take it over, and run it themselves. The multinational decided to close it down instead, probably for reasons of class-consciousness."<p>Aside from the fact that this story is clearly made-up, the idea that a profit-seeking corporation would favor "shutting down" an asset rather than selling it because it fears an uprising of the working class is just about the stupidest fucking thing I've ever heard.

I think there is an ongoing obsession in this country to always live in fear and convince oneself that things are always at their worst and the bottom is always about to fall out at any moment. Maybe it's human nature. But I just don't buy this doom and gloom nonsense. Yes the economy is bad, there is no question about that, but the economy has been bad before. Probably the last comparable period was the late 70's.<p>I think more than anything what's changed is our access to information. Before people never really knew how corrupt companies and politicians can be and they never had 24/7 access to the opinions of every person in the English-speaking world to reinforce their pessimism.<p>The U.S. is losing manufacturing jobs, but that could be remedied by a number of changes- import tariffs, a reduction or freeze on minimum wage, an unforeseen economic boost from a new industry (such as auto manufacturing in the 50's or the internet boom of the 90's).<p>One place where I wholly disagree with Chomsky is the unimportance of the deficit. That is a major, major problem. It is true that creating jobs would help shrink the deficit, but I think there is a lot of rampant spending by the U.S. government that does absolutely nothing to grow or maintain the economy or jobs and should be abolished.

Peculiar article - I'd read a couple of sentences and think, "wow, Noam's spot on here". Then after the next few sentences or major point, I'd think, "what a moron".<p>Seems like there is something for everyone to love and hate in this one. Probably the one thing everyone can agree on is the concentration of wealth and stratification of society isn't a good thing.<p>Like a lot of these analyses, it is often hard to sort out cause/effect, I'm not so sure that this article didn't make some wrong conclusions in this regard.<p>I do have to say his contention that OWS is the first push-back against the concentration &#38; corruption of power in the U.S. is sort of naive. There are plenty of people and movements that have been railing about this at least since the early 90's - I'm not going to mention specific ones because I don't want to seem like I'm touting them.

The first chart comparing productivity and income is pretty telling<p><a href="http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/06/speedup-americans-working-harder-charts" rel="nofollow">http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/06/speedup-american...</a>

On one hand, I do feel like things are going fairly well compared historically, but it also, somehow, at the same time feels like everything is going wrong, and I'm not going to be able to have a job in my field very long, (retirement, what?), given outsourcing and companies moving jobs to whatever country has the cheapest labor this year.<p>I also feel like we, as a country (Canada), are going to lose a lot of expertise to outsourcing and multi-national job movement, ie. pay for the cheaper outsourcing in other ways later.<p>That said I am trying to do something about it by getting involved in the local startup community and try to create my own job, but that is quite difficult.

"It’s quite different now. For many people in the United States, there’s a pervasive sense of hopelessness, sometimes despair."<p>It's because we've been pacified through handouts and the welfare state. There's no longer a need to think about working hard and getting out of the unemployment morass we're in. Government will take care of you!<p>Food stamp spending is at all-time record levels. Millions more people have gone on "disability" since 2007. The number of people in the work force continues to decline. Participation rate in the workforce is at multi-decade lows. The government-created housing bubble has made job mobility much more difficult, and of course both personal and public debt levels have reached saturation.<p>So, why not get unlimited student loans, get food stamps, get yourself declared to have a disability, and then gorge on all the benefits of being "poor" like a free cellphone, and reduced cost internet.<p>We've turned into a nation of dependents!