I'm very happy to have landed in the Gulch... However, even though I think that a lot of the comments come from a patriotic place, many of them are missing the point. The video by WalMart about the factory, for example, totally ignores the innovators and entrepreneurs who made the factory possible. The factory is merely a bunch of inanimate objects. The LIFE of the factory is in the synapses firing in the brains of the folks who had the vision to bring it into existence. Unfortunately, the managers who took over from the founders didn't have their vision, and they allowed their charges to decline into oblivion and their competitors to steal a march on them. There's too much focus on labor, as if value is created by "labor." Actually, value is created by "innovation." The things the "laborers" should have been looking for, while they were working in the factory, were changes that improved efficiency and effectiveness. It's not "low cost" labor that's attracting factories from all over the world, but the fact that the latest innovations can be installed on top of that "cheap labor," making the competitive advantage overwhelming. As that cheap labor increases in cost, as we're seeing, then the US market is gaining in popularity, but the new factories are being built in places where impediments to innovation are least, like in right to work states. If we are ever to come even close to the production level that existed in the past, we also need to understand that the manufacturing sector is going to go through the same shrinking that agriculture went through. Even though agriculture only employs 2% of the population (vs. 60 - 80% in the past), there's more agricultural output than ever. The same will take place in manufacturing, so don't expect a huge surge in employment when the factories do return. Just as agriculture had to shrink to provide the workforce for manufacturing, so manufacturing is shrinking to make way for the future economic activities that are coming to a town near you. Frank Lloyd Wright had a vision for a city (I believe he called it Usonia), in which there was a farm belt immediately surrounding the city, that provided the bulk of the food supply. That's probably something that we should be looking at going forward, especially since the career path that our parents and grandparents has joined the dinosaurs, and will never come back. What we're looking at is a complete change of lifestyle. We need to be addressing the issues surround this change.