Bernanke: "The service sector of our economy is about 80%"...

[Subdivisions]

We nearly no longer manufacture anything. A nation CANNOT survive without producing things to sell. Period.

We're well and truly screwn.

[Cary]

1. I'm not so sure that this is true, but . . .

it's always a good idea to be diversified. It seems that we do need to do something to cultivate more manufacturing in order to diversify our economy.

[smoogatz]

7. We could start by not giving huge tax breaks to companies

that move their manufacturing operations overseas, and giving tax breaks to companies that manufacture domestically, in order to offset some of their increased labor and regulatory costs. It's just common sense.

[smoogatz]

2. We make the best damned guitars on the planet.

Electric and acoustic. And some kick-ass amps, too. But yeah, other than that? Bupkis.

[ContinentalOp]

5. Sorry, I'd rather buy Japanese these days. -nt-

[smoogatz]

11. Fffflfllbblllxxgggzzssspptttt.

Whatever, dude. Like what, an Ibanez? Are any of them still actually made in japan?

[ContinentalOp]

15. Actually, I haven't bought a new guitar in a long time, and I know you can't legitimately...

buy a Japanese Fender here these days. But the ones I've played seemed much nicer than what they're making over here and recent Gibsons are an absolute joke. Although I guess my newest addition (a Warmoth partscaster) is, in fact a US made guitar so never mind. ;)

[smoogatz]

22. They run the gamut.

I've owned a couple of MIM Fenders that were actually pretty well done--swap out the pickups for Lollars and they'd be super stage guitars--I've also owned a recent American Deluxe that I liked a lot except it was heavy as hell (ash). My two current Fenders are an American '62 RI thin-skin Strat and a Custom Shop NOS '56 Strat with a couple of updated tweaks (9" radius, medium-jumbo frets). Both are amazing guitars. I have a couple of recent Gibsons, too--a four-year-old LP Standard and a J45 acoustic about ten years old; I like them both just fine. The new high-end Gibosn stuff (VOS '59 RIs, etc.) is spectacular, IMO, if you've got that kind of scratch to spend on gear. Amp-wise I'm more into the boutique-y stuff these days: I love my Dr. Z, and I'm thinking about ordering a Retro-King 18-watt next. The one Japanese-made guitar I'd consider buying is the Gretsch Setzer hotrod; you can get decent deals on used ones now. Great guitars.

[Romulox]

47. I bought a MIJ Fender Mustang bass last night at Guitar Center. nt

[girl gone mad]

33. My Fender precision bass..

(Aerodyne) was made in Japan. It's not top of the line, but really high quality for the price.

[Romulox]

48. The Aerodynes are middle of the road. Not as nice as the American P Bass. nt

[Cary]

14. Hamer. Made right down the street from where I live. n/t

[Romulox]

49. Hamer has been owned by a German company for years, and makes most of its stuff in China. nt

[Cary]

18. My favorite U.S. made is All-Clad pots and pans.

Ass kickers, they are:

http://www.all-clad.com/

So it is possible.

[pamela]

45. Yep! Paul Reed Smith!

Best electric and soon to be best amps and acoustic.

[Romulox]

50. Other than Martin, I can't agree with you. Fender is OK; Gibson is crap. nt

[TexasObserver]

3. The DOW has lost 100 points while he's been talking.

[Subdivisions]

21. -350 now. n/t

[TexasObserver]

25. It appears the FED is not going to juice the DOW again with a rate decrease.

[Subdivisions]

26. Nope. No rate cut. Which was actually priced in to yesterday's action. n/t

[MercutioATC]

4. We "manufacture" a lot of Big Macs...

See? Everything's fine! :)

[Cessna Invesco Palin]

6. We're the largest manufacturer in the world.

Not for long certainly, but it's not true that we "no longer manufacture anything."

[DJ13]

8. .....so Mr. Bernanke, who's fault is that?

Theres no faster path to a nation's bankruptcy than the unregulated pursuit of profits without concern over the consequences.

[ContinentalOp]

9. What's wrong with a service economy?

As long as we can still make some food, why is it important that we have domestic manufacturing?

[RB TexLa]

13. It's not important to have it, growth of manufacturing is no more important that growth of any other

aspect of an economy.

[Subdivisions]

19. If we do not manufacture stuff, we don't get the money from

exports coming in to the country. If there are no manufacturing jobs, there is less to service.

[ContinentalOp]

23. I guess what I don't understand is that people predicting the next depression...

have said that it would be worse than the previous one due to lack of manufacturing jobs. But during a depression, who cares about that stuff? We buy and sell and discard too much crap already. In a depression food and shelter are all that matters.

And in fact, wouldn't it be easier to create new service jobs in a new WPA type scenario? It wouldn't be like the depression where there were millions of uneducated farmers and factory workers so we had to build bridges just to find manual labor for them to do.

[truedelphi]

36. People were NOT uneducated in the thirties

They lacked fancy pants college degrees, but most of them could THINK.

And they used common sense 24/7.

My dad gave me his seventh grade text books for his public school history and geology classes when I was in about fifth grade.

His geology book would have stymied incoming college freshman - dense type, long and difficult words.

Meanwhile, when I tutor high school kids these days, they do not know that a half dollar is worth fifty cents or that there are four quarters in a buck. <sigh> And these are kids from affluent homes. Often a child is in high school and has not even learned the multiplication,division, subtraction or addition tables.

[ContinentalOp]

40. I didn't say they were dumb. I said they were uneducated.

"Between 1915 and 1950, the national high-school-graduation rate rose from roughly 15 percent to roughly 60 percent, and college attend-ance also spiked." http://chronicle.com/free/v54/i46/46b01001.htm

My point was if you have millions of farmers who are out of work because of a dust bowl, it's much harder to find work for them that it would be to create a job for your average high school graduate today. Unskilled service jobs are much easier to create out of thin air than manufacturing jobs which require massive infrastructure.

[truedelphi]

51. Farmers were well equipped to learn the jobs of the WPA.

Most farmers already knew welding - it was simply much more time effective to fix machinery on site on the farm than to get in the Model T and go into town, order a part, wait for it to arrive from the big city days later, and then to have to install it.

In the mid-nineties, one of the heads of Cornell University's mechanical engineering departments
deplored the fact that kids today grow up in the cities -they simply spend so much time in front of their game consoles and their computers, that they don't know how to fix a thing. Whereas until the mid-eighties, there were enough young people from farming communities coming into the university that the department didn't have to teach remedial mechanics.

I would argue that never before have people been so poorly educated. Degrees among almost every strata of our society are in abundance, I will concede that point. If you think a degree makes you educated, you've proved the point to yourself. But many people with degrees cannot think themselves out of a paper bag. This society would not be in the mess that it is in if people were able to conceptualize.

[Cary]

16. Employment. n/t.

[hunter]

17. Food, shelter, medicine, education.

Most everything else is gravy. The remaining "service" economy could be anything -- and it wouldn't be a bad thing if these services were pursuits that didn't require a lot of natural resources, like making music or telling stories.

[smoogatz]

24. Balance of trade.

It's harder to sell services to other countries, so you end up with a big transfer of wealth out of the U.S. Also manufacturing jobs used to pay pretty well compared to most "service" jobs (low-level clerks, retail jobs, etc.). Also, a service economy works okay when the price of manufactured goods is stable, but it can suck to be trapped in a mostly service-based economy when the price of manufactured goods starts to rise; we get less for our money, and the increased profits all go overseas.

[ContinentalOp]

27. Thanks for the explanation. That makes some sense.

How does that work in a depression scenario though? What percentage of those manufactured goods are actually essential?

[smoogatz]

31. Well, by definition a depression is a massive slowing of economic activity

across the board. For whatever reason, people and businesses stop buying stuff. In the U.S., the Great Depression of the 1930s was a deflationary depression—what happened was that in the stock market crash of '29 (and a couple of subsequent mini-crashes) and then the massive bank failures in which millions of uninsured depositors lost everything they had, money itself became a scarce commodity: there was simply not enough capital to keep the economy running. The Hoover administration should have responded by printing more dollars to stimulate the economy, but they were basically free-marketeers and their response was slow, reluctant and insufficient. So, in the case of the Great Depression in the U.S., the manufacturing economy basically shut down for lack of customers on one hand and capital on the other--hence the massive waves of unemployment. The people who did well during the depression were those who were able to keep their jobs (my grandfather had a good civil service job in Baltimore; they actually had a cook, a maid and a yard-man all through the depression), people who didn't trust banks or stocks and took their money out before those systems collapsed, and people who provided essential goods and services: my other grandfather got into manufacturing funeral vaults during the depression and also did just fine. Prosperous farmers--those who weren't victims of the dust bowl or foreclosure--also did quite well. The next depression is more likely to be an inflationary depression, though, because our national debt is so enormous. Think Weimar Germany, and wheelbarrows full of cash to buy a loaf of bread.

[Ikonoklast]

28. A country that doesn't *make* anything does not control it's own destiny

Without manufacturing, you have financial services (see current disaster) mining, or agriculture to produce value.

No manufacturing, and you cannot support the other parts of your economy independent of other countries willingness to sell finished products to you.

Say we stopped producing harvesting equipment, one thing we excel at, and all that equipment has to be imported from a foreign power that one day may not be as friendly, and for political reasons refuse to sell to us.

What do you do? Let produce rot in the fields? Ramp up production hoping to build enough equipment to meet demand within one years time frame? Or pay whatever they demand for equipment in order to feed your populace?

It's a scam to say that we don't need a domestic manufacturing base. It's an argument the off-shorers use to evade paying the high wages that skilled manufacturing employees demand.

"We'll make it in China for $1.15 an hour, sell it back in America, keep the price high, and pocket the difference."

This is the end result of the off-shoring of manufacturing.

[Leopolds Ghost]

30. You can't buy 75% of the world's manufacture goods when you have no foreign exchange

To exchange with -- save for the threat of US military action that is built into the petrodollar -- which allows us to use the oil under other countries in the Middle East to back our own currency which we have a monopoly on printing.

Notice how many economists are advocating a "helicopter money" solution to the problem? "WE OWN THE PRINTING PRESSES!" they are now saying. "We can pay anyone for anything, especially wealthy who need them money worst!"

[TahitiNut]

39. When you CONSUME what you don't PRODUCE, you're going into debt to do it.

If you want to get out of manufacturing, then get out of a consumption-based economy. It's as simple as that. It would require a MASSIVE redirection of our habits - self-gratification. We'd have to redirect our economic activities towards INFRASTRUCTURE ... utilities, transportation, transmission, communications, recreation, and education ... and savings. We'd have to train people (and COMPENSATE them) in maintenance, repair, renovation, recycling, and conservation.

It'd be hard enough to do by changing where we SPEND before we changed where we EARN ... but doing it in reverse is damned painful, and Americans don't take pain very well.

[ContinentalOp]

41. But in a depression, that change would come about automatically, out of necessity would it not?

[TahitiNut]

42. How do you get out of it without producing your own ladders??

In a depression, how does a manufacturing business even start? It's still a matter of property, plant, and equipment and a skilled labor force. We have the latter ... but we shipped the equipment to Asia.

After all, when we don't produce anything that people want to buy, then we don't even have the bootstraps - since we don't produce boots. One of the major exports of this country are weapons - big weapons of all kinds - death and destruction. So ... do we try to get the rest of the world to got to war so we can sell weapons?

Remember ... we have a vested interest in CREATING markets for what we actually PRODUCE. Hollywood and war.

One of the stupidest things a nation can do is disrespect its workers. Without labor, there is no wealth.

[Lost-in-FL]

10. Basic economics

We only produce war and debt.

[daa]

12. Unfortunately

80% of that 80% was finance.

[gasperc]

20. fuck it, I'm going to photo copy my own money

before it's all worthless

[Leopolds Ghost]

29. Don't worry -- according to DLC and millionaire so-called-liberal pundits, those jobs aren't worth

lamenting.

We'll replace them with "green industry" jobs manufacturing solar panels (and natural gas fittings for all the new natural gas supplies we'll be burning under the Pickens Plan! You know, using machine tools manufactured in China because machine tool manufacture is a "dirty" and "naturally low-paying" industry that is "on decline" and "old economy".

Best to let China manufacture everything dirty, then we can wash the blood off our hands AND pretend the so-called-liberal punditocracy is not directly oppressing union labor, just lamenting their inevitable job loss and encouraging them to invest in suburban retail marketing jobs catering to luxury commodities marketed on credit.

[femrap]

32. WASF

We are so fucked.

[dysfunctional press]

34. we still make some kick-ass street-sweepers here in elgin illinois...

http://www.elginsweeper.com/home_2.asp

[SoCalDem]

35. While we were sleeping, everything changed, and now that we are "awake"

it may just be too late to change much..

When "everyone's Mom" HAD to get a job, just to make ends meet, should have been the moment in time when we said.."Hey, what's going on here?"..but we all said a collective "Yay for Feminism"..

When kids could no longer earn enough at a summer job to pay for next year's college, we should have said "Hey, what's going on here"..but we all said a collective "Those kids must be lazy & don't want to work"..

When people's dads started being forced into retirement at 45, or lost their jobs entirely, we should have said.. "Hey, he's got 20 more years to go before Social Security"..but we all said a collective "Gotta clear out the deadwood, to make room for the younger, smarter guys"..

When factories started closing up and moving away, we should have said "Hey what's going on here..our town needs those jobs, and they make a profit"..byt we collectively said "Those people can get "re-training" and learn a new & exciting job for the 21st century"..

When Walmarts & Taco bells & McDonalds & "chain stores/restaurants" pushed all the local businesses off the cliff, we should have said " Hey, this is not necessarily that good of an idea"..but we collectively said.."Cool! Mc Donalds a block from my house/school/job/another McDonalds/Starbucks/Wendy's/PizzaHut"

All these things have consequences...eventually.. and we have arrived at "eventually".

[onethatcares]

37. yeah, remember when that was the pronouncement?

we're no longer a manufacturing economy, we're a service economy, now we're a consumer society. I've often wondered where the tangible items were gonna come from when we no longer used our factories or our hands to produce.

Well, I guess this is the result, and hopefully it's not the end.

Jeez, they even took away shop courses and vo tech, steering our kids to computer code and other office type jobs. What's next

[PA Democrat]

38. Anyone ever read Kevin Phillips' book "Wealth and Democracy"?

He looks at what factors led to the decline of the golden ages of past economic giants: the British empire, Spain during the 1500s, and Holland during the 1600s. There were a lot of common themes, a shift from manufacturing to service (with a heavy emphasis on financial speculation) type economy, income polarization, over-extension of the military, foreign debt, etc. Sound familiar boys and girls?

The US has been steadily traveling down the same road and Bushie-boy has managed to press the accelerator completely to the floor. While those former economic powerhouses gradually declined over many decades, it looks like we are in for a much more rapid fall.

[many a good man]

43. Point taken, but don't exaggerate

We don't exactly mfr nothing.

[itsrobert]

44. We should manufacture solar

how about that?

[OakCliffDem]

46. Kick