A lot of people seem to be linking to Matt Haughey’s How to get my nerd vote which might better be entitled “How to get the left center vote” which I think Barack Obama already has wrapped up. But since he claims to be a nerd, Haughey might want to learn to use The Google so he avoids nonsense like this,
Broadband Everywhere. I want crazy South Korea/Japan style broadband I’ve heard about for years: 100Mbps (upload and download) fiber connections for less than $50/month with unlimited bandwidth and the ability to run your own servers. I know the US is a big spread out country and it makes this stuff somewhat difficult/costly, but it’s an ambitious goal with a ton of payoff. We don’t have manufacturing jobs in the US anymore: we don’t make things, we don’t build things, we don’t sew things here, but we do have lots of ideas and inventions.
We don’t make or build things anymore?
The United States is easily the single biggest producer of manufactured goods in the world. We’ve all heard from the media about the vaunted progress that China is making in manufacturing, and certainly those are real gains. But the reality is that in 2006 U.S. manufacturing output was 2.5 times that of China’s.
Moreover, although manufacturing continues to decline as a percentage of U.S. GDP, it has continued to steadily increase in absolute terms (or, to put it a bit differently, other parts of the U.S. economy have grown much faster than manufacturing even without “broadband everywhere”).
To say that we don’t make or build anything in America anymore is a bit like saying that we don’t grow anything anymore. Like the agricultural sector, the manufacturing sector has seen steady improvements in productivity which produce the counterintuitive result that as production has increased, employment in both of those industries has gradually declined.
For a more thorough analysis of the state of U.S. manufacturing see Daniel Ikenson’s Thriving in a Global Economy: The Truth about U.S. Manufacturing.