This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, August 28th, 2007. I'm Caleb Brown.

The death of the U.S. manufacturing sector has been greatly exaggerated, so says Dan

Eichenson, the Associate Director of Cato's Center for Trade Policy

Studies.

He says manufacturing is doing well, and assertions to the contrary are either terribly mistaken

or political posturing.

His new policy analysis thriving in a global economy,

the truth about US manufacturing and trade,

is available at our website, Cato.org.

US manufacturing is doing extremely well right now, contrary to a popular misconception.

Since the manufacturing recession ended in 2002, all of the major operating indicators have been trending upward. In 2006,

the U.S. manufacturing experienced record sales, record profits, record profit rates, record return on investment, and record output.

It's really firing on all cylinders, and however, many in Congress are putting forward this myth that because manufacturing is declining, we need

to get involved and impose trade barriers to help save it from the tides of international trade.

Now when gauging the effectiveness of U.S US manufacturing, all those numbers are great and wonderful.

Democrats and even Republicans, though, use job losses as sort of the key measurement for least, at least when they go out on the

campaign trail often, as the key metric for measuring the effectiveness of the

manufacturing sector and to an extent they're right jobs have been in decline in that sector.

That's true. It's not a recent phenomenon.

Jobs peaked in the manufacturing sector in 1979 and since then they've been in a constant decline as has

been the case with other developed countries in the manufacturing recession in

2001, 2002 we lost about 2.8 million manufacturing jobs that have not returned.

...