STILL MADE IN THE USA

One of my pet peeves is politicians (who should know better) and others (who listen to politicians) talking about how “We don’t manufacture anything in the US anymore.”

It just ain’t so.

The US still manufactures a bit more than 19% of everything manufactured on the planet. That has not changed significantly in 40-50 years.

I was having this discussion the other day, got to wondering about year by year manufacturing output and found Excel spreadsheet of GDP by country by segment. So I pulled the manufacturing data for the US from 1970 to 2010. With 3-4 exceptions, manufacturing output increased every year.

So then I wondered if this was due to increasing population. I plugged in the US population and calculated the manufacturing output per capita. Here is what the numbers tell us:

The figures are inflation adjusted using 2005 dollars.

The complete year by year spreadsheet can be downloaded at:

http://unstats.un.org/unsd/snaama/dnltransfer.asp?fID=1

Next time someone tells you the US no longer makes anything, send them here.

1970 $1,225.33
1980 $2,578.37
1990 $4,185.61
2000 $5,386.95
2010 $6,011.43