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A return to manufacturing?
Jesse Richman, 9/5/2011

Writing in the September 4th Washington Times, Harold Meyerson presents stark and sobering statistics about the decline of America, and the increasing interest in regaining American manufacturing power.  What he does not discuss is a road to get there.  But it is good that he and others are increasingly advocating efforts to strengthen manufacturing by ending the blythe policies that have produced imbalanced trade and deindustrialization.

Meyerson concludes:

Since that new economy blew up three years ago, many of those elites have been disabused of the financial fantasies that ordinary Americans long ago ceased to entertain. The fact that Greenstone and Looney’s study emerged from the Hamilton Project — a pillar of new-economy thinking, founded by Clinton Treasury secretary Robert Rubin — is evidence of a paradigm shift in economic vision. From centrist Democratic groups such as the Progressive Policy Institute and Third Way, to economists such as Hoover Institution Nobel laureate Michael Spence, to chief executives and former chief executives such as Dow Chemical’s Andrew Liveris and Intel’s Andy Grove, the new watchword for America’s future — however challenging it may be to get there — is manufacturing.

Post-industrial America turned out to be a bust. The time for neo-industrial America has arrived

The entire essay is worth reading.