@Blickers,
Blickers wrote:
I will only thank the Republican Congress for good economic performance since 2011 with a Democratic President when I hear a couple of Republicans, when discussing economic performance during the 1980s, say, "Ronnie who? Three cheers for Tip O'Neill !!"
In addition, the much maligned manufacturing sector was in free fall until Obama took office, as this chart illustrates. Please don't try to sneak credit for this to the Republican Congress george, for as you can see, the turnaround happened two years before John Boehner could even sniff Nancy Pelosi's seat as Speaker:
It a common enough but still foolish assumption to believe that the instant a political party takes control of this or that branch of government they become the real "owner " of whatever economic trend emerges. The fact is that the most economic phenomena take time to dfevelop and evolve, and usually the facors behind them are not dominated by the actions of our government.
The decline of American manufacturing began in the 1970s, as a result of the growth of competitors all over the world from Europe to Japan and Korea. The US emerged from WWII with the only intact industrial plant in the world and we easily dominated most industries from steel and metals production to vehicles, aircraftt, industrial and consumer products. The decline that started in the 1970s was at first accelerated by the greater average efficiency of the (necessarily) newer plants in reconstructed Europe and Asia and by the relatively lower cost of labor in both areas. All this was an inevitable result of the reconstruction of other foreign economic structures. It has continued since then aided by higher labor costs here and in some cases looser environmental laws in Asia (China in particular). The recent resurgance of manufacturing in this country is aided by the decline in unionization (judging at least by the states in which most of the new manufacturing is occurring ); rising labor costs among some of our international competitors; and lately by the boom in natural gas and oil production through fracking. Energy and the chemical products derived from petroleum are critical feedstocks for all manufacturing and the US has been far qwuicker to exploit these factors than have many of our competitors.
Domestic political policies do play a part, but compared to those cited above it is minor.
