The Manufacturing Sector Snafu - and - The Voters' Values...

So what's all this hullabaloo over manufacturing? Listening to Obama, Santorum and Romney you'd think our manufacturing sector is being Chinese-water-tortured to death...

Obama's going to tax foreign and reward domestic production... Santorum's going to tax manufacturers zip, and everyone else 17%... Romney has an 11 thousand point plan that'll create 11 million jobs, a bunch in manufacturing, during his first four years as president... Romney's kind of like Obama's healthcare plan (a la Nancy Pelosi); we need to elect him first, then find out what he's all about... All I know about Gingrich is he's going to colonize the moon by the end of his second term... I'm not sure what that means... Who [on earth] would want to live on the moon? And how many manufacturing jobs would that create? And as for Ron Paul, he'd cut the corporate tax rate to 15% initially, allow companies to repatriate foreign-held capital free of tax, and he'd cut a trillion dollars of spending by immediately closing 5 government departments - and he'd put all that money back into the business community (i.e., leave it there by cutting taxes)... And why isn't he in the lead?

Allow me a moment to digress:

Under President Obama we've seen government intervention (spending, borrowing, regulating, legislating) beyond our wildest dreams... Bush presided over a doubling of our national debt in just 8 years... Obama matched him, then trumped him, by a few hundred billion, in 3...

I know, I'm not being fair; Obama inherited a nightmare of an economy - the Bush recession... Yea but Bush was dealt 9/11 and inherited the Clinton tech bubble... They both, alas, turned out to be Keynesians... Their answer to declining revenue was higher spending... I.e., get out of trouble by going into debt... Huh???... And don't we always seem to forget that Congress has a little something to do with allocating taxpayer money as well?

Now I've heard all the stories, all the conspiracy theories, and I just don't buy the notion that President Obama is out to communize the United States of America... I do however see him as a man with little clue when it comes to the economy or to business in general... But I can't blame him, he has no experience... He's simply doing what good community organizers do; spend other people's money on other [select] people... And apparently there's been enough voters who either are, or aspire to be, "select"- and who, believing wealth redistribution to be the path to prosperity, support the cause... That's why he won... He was simply the candidate who best reflected the values of the majority of U.S. voters... The question is, does he still? If so, pray for gridlock!!

Back to our topic:

The aforementioned policymakers (save for Mr. Paul) are either profoundly union-inspired, profoundly influenced by some other select group, or profoundly ignorant to reality... According to the U.S. Census Bureau, manufacturing in America is off the bloody charts; $5 trillion last year... Our manufacturing output is larger than Germany's entire economy... And these blokes would have you believe we're experiencing a manufacturing-sector depression... It simply isn't so...

So what then are they talking about? Manufacturing jobs!! Yep, that's the hook...

Now PLEASE, take a couple minutes and read George Mason University's Walter Williams' enlightening article It Just Ain't So... He does a wonderful job putting this into perspective... Click here...