Desperate to pass TPP, Obama's Administration wants to change the way trade in manufactured goods

[Hoyt]

40. It would help if those who see this as a great conspiracy read this.

http://www.bls.gov/bls/factoryless_goods_producers.htm

This is strictly a change that provides additional information to economists and policy makers. The additional information will even help unions and all others -- like you and me -- who are concerned about outsourcing of jobs for cheaper labor vs. sending certain aspects of production to localities that specialize in the product to improve the product.

You'll also will find that it will be easy to identify so-called "factoryless production" from manufactoring done completely in the USA. Thus, no reputable economist or policymaker is going to suddenly use this to tout a 30% increase in production as if outsourcing were no longer a problem and domestic manufacturing is increasing.

There's a lot of useful, anti-conspiratorial information at the link above. For example read #9 which explains that this "factoryless" change in raw statistics for research and policy making will not result in anything a conspirator could use to fool people that domestic manufacturing is improving --

Total U.S. employment and wages -- U.S. totals are not expected to change.
U.S. production employees -- U.S. totals are not expected to change. U.S. sector total changes are expected to
be minimal, since FGPs would have few, if any, production employees.

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There is some additional information in the Notice in the Federal Register. For example, North American countries -- Mexico, Canada and the USA -- have collaborated on this change to ensure data is comparable.

http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2014-05-22/pdf/2014-11914.pdf

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There is no question outsourcing of manufacturing is a problem for the US, our employment, and the future of our society.

But darn it, this "statistical" change for factoryless goods (as defined above) is not some grand scheme to screw us.