It is too little and too late to keep writing “manufacturing matters.” Everything else in the economy is secondary to manufacturing, mining and farming. Only these activities build wealth.
In contrast, service activities consume wealth. Each time money changes hands in the consumer, service and government segments, a significant portion of wealth drains out of the system. That’s why our trade deficit is nearly 3 percent of gross domestic product. By boosting the wealth-creating segments of our economy, we can add more into the system than gets drained out. Otherwise, the rest of the world will get tired of taking green pieces of paper in exchange for goods, the U.S. dollar will collapse, and the U.S. will become the low-wage country to which the Chinese send dirty, unappealing manual work to get done cheaply.