Manufacturing: Make It In America (Again)

Steny Hoyer's got a good post up at TheHill.com, the paper for the company town that is DC. It's an article on what we need to do to bring manufacturing back, or reestablish it, in America. And why. And what the Dems have been doing about it.
The rest of this post makes little sense if you don't read it and the comments (there are only seven) on it.

Apparently, my 'comments' were rejected by the administrator. Not sure why. So I'm posting them here. See, I'm a liberal, a Democrat, and I worked 15 years in manufacturing, developing shop floor systems for, among other companies, a job shop/aviation station out in Burbank, at the end of the southbound runway. Unofficial motto: 'We stand under what we sell.' Always proud of that job. I worked in electronics manufacturing, elastomer compounding, and repetitive systems. I loved it.

So when I shoot mine off on manufacturing, I have some experience, and an APICS cert, for those of you who know what that is.

This, then, is the post that wasn't:

@CurryWalker - So you will call your Republican Reps and Sens and tell them to support the Democratic "Make It In America" bill that they blocked yesterday, to give tax breaks for manufacturing jobs brought back to US and eliminate tax breaks for shipping jobs off-shore from now on? Yea, didn't think you would.

@Kimberlee - From '68 to 2008, 40 years, the White House had only two Democrats, Carter and Clinton, for a total of 12 years. For half of those 12 years, Congress was fully Republican (1995 on). Bush Junior had wall-to-wall Republican activism for six of his eight years, and got everything he wanted except the privatization of Social Security. I don't know what 46 years you're talking about. Do you?

@Knuckles - I worked in mfg for 15 years. The big reason Detroit died was because management fought every new technology, from seat belts to unleaded gas to antilock brakes, as well as new materials science and mfg technologies, until after the Japs had installed them in every car, made those cars better and cheaper, and then cleaned Detroit's clock. To this day, most SUVs are classified as trucks, and thanks to industry lobbying, head restraints are not required in those. But try to sell one without 'em.  Union costs over non-union costs for labor were a tiny percentage of the differential among American versus foreign manufacturers of cars. American manufacturing management was just stoooopid. Example: Roger Smith, of GM, tried to replace every worker with a multi-million dollar robot. No redesign of process, no analysis of line layout, no knowledge of robotic technology's abilities. Just a 1:1 replacement. It's a wonder GM lasted until you could blame everything on Obama.

The reason why this recession will take so long to recover from is that we have no idle plants for workers to return to. Most of the jobs have left. The last major manufacturing industry is/was housing. Until someone has the balls to create an entire new, local industry (say, solar on every roof in America, which would create mfg jobs, installation companies, infrastructure investment, maintenance and repair businesses, reduce pollution by reducing burning for energy, and improve security by dispersing the national power-generation capacity) this recession is going to last, and America's employee class is going to be working for peanuts.

And that was the Republican plan all along. And you can look that up on the ATR.org web site. (Hi, Grover!)

Tax cuts and deregulation have been the order of the day for twelve years (1995 Gingrich Revolution to 2007 Dem Take Back of America,) and we're in the disaster that is the natural result of using those policies, exclusively, to run a country. And Republicans can't (or won't) propose anything else. "Party of Ideas" indeed.