Reply #25: Thing is

[renie408]

Can you really take care of the schools in areas where large chunks of the supporting tax infrastructure (in the form of a mill or factory that supplies thousands of jobs to the area) disappears over night? Where I live, they just lost about 4800 jobs in a town near here that has a population of roughly 10,000. That community isn't going to recover from that. It doesn't do a kid much good to have a great computer in a great school when their parents don't have jobs and can't feed them. It is easy to be cynical and blase and say that manufacturing is dead, but remember that there are a lot of PEOPLE attached to that death.

I don't think that we, as a country, should be investing in the same kind of manufacutring that we have now indefinitely. But I just listened to a segment on NPR yesterday, I think, that said that US manufacturing was not dead, it just needs to evolve. Maybe what we should do is give manufacturing some breathing room, so that it can either reinvent itself or die a little slower and more easily absorbed death.

edit: correct typo