[mlsu]

This statistic is often trotted out.

It's in dollars, which is very misleading and forms an incomplete picture of the ecosystem required to have true manufacturing ability. We do final assembly on an automobile and that gets registered as big $$$. But it's actually pretty easy to assemble a bunch of already-made parts. Much more difficult (and quite a lot of skill, built up over decades) to make the fuel pump from raw inputs! We lack completely the lower three-quarters of the pyramid.

By this same logic, I did $500 in manufacturing this quarter because I assembled two Billy bookcase... nah.

You don't know anyone because... we don't do a lot of manufacturing. The pre-made imported parts come into a handful of Toyota factories, and a whole bunch of very expensive SUVs come out. That's how you can get such a high $$$ number and not know anyone who works manufacturing.

[buescher]

Sure, the whole supply chain is not in the US, and less of it is in the US than in past decades. That is not the point.

You probably don't know anyone who works in manufacturing because you're in the demographic that reads hackernews. Using the automotive industry as an example is a big tell, you know, because a whole lot more than cars is manufactured in the US. Manufacturing is not a huge percentage of US employment, but it is much, much bigger than you think in raw numbers. Go look it up - 67,000 does not move the needle, though it's a big percentage of new jobs.