The latest preliminary data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics show Wisconsin with 15.6% of its jobs in manufacturing last month, compared to 15.4% for Indiana.
Those are down from May 2008 rates of 17% for Wisconsin and 17.8% for Indiana, demonstrating the decline of factory jobs in the recession.
The numbers also illustrate how much more Indiana is suffering from the decline than Wisconsin. Since May 1998, Wisconsin lost nearly 160,000 manufacturing jobs or 31%. Meantime, Indiana lost more than 224,000 or 37%.
Also from the article: "Remaining a leading manufacturing state should be important, Ward said. "It's a good thing, in the sense that we're finding fewer and fewer parts of the country with the expertise that can manufacture to scale,"
That's fairly scary, that fewer and fewer parts of the country can handle large manufacturing jobs. You know, when animal species become endangered, we go out of our way to protect them... one thing we do is keep our hands off their environment. Perhaps the government should keep its hands off the manufacturing environment: eliminate minimum wage in Indiana, scale back EPA and other government regulations, etc. Given freedom, manufacturing jobs will flow back into Indiana.
Instead, the Administration is talking about taxing carbon. Taxing carbon is manufacturing's killing season.
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