re: #473 Talking Point Detective

It has been a few years since I looked at it in detail, and I don’t have anything at my fingertips - here’s something that came up with a quick Google, not broken down by industry:

Image: corpdebt2.jpg

It is simply a fact that corporations, including manufacturers, trended towards taking on more debt in the recent decades - by a significant measure.

If you look around, you’ll see that the manufacturing industry, as a whole turned, increasingly, towards raising stock prices through debt acquisition (as counter-intuitive as that seems) to attract investors.

If you don’t want to do the research yourself and you don’t want to take my word for it, that’s your prerogative.

To a large degree, automation has increased the baseline skill level of employees in the manufacturing industry, not decreased it.

And I don’t think that we’re talking about problems that are as mutually exclusive as you do. Despite the growth in output, the manufacturing industry in this country, but not just this country, has some very significant obstacles.

There are always obstacles. Obdi is right about this and you’re missing his points. Mfg in the U.S. is doing relatively well. We produce a lot of stuff.