Chris Christie Quotes

By the time I was leaving school, there were no factories. There was no industry.

You lose manufacturing jobs, you rarely ever get them back again.

Do we want in this nation to lose the backbone of manufacturing in this country? Do we want to be a nation that doesn't want to manufacture anything?

America, the temple of invention and industry, doesn't make things anymore.

Unfortunately, we have lost our manufacturing capacity.

I have lived my whole life just outside Youngstown, Ohio. We watched the steel mills close and 50,000 jobs disappear in the late 1970s. We watched businesses move overseas throughout the 1990s and early 2000s.

Since 2000, we have lost 2.7 million manufacturing jobs, of which 500,000 jobs were in high-tech industries such as telecommunications and electronics.

America's moved so much of its production and manufacturing offshore, it's become a nation of middlemen.

Being a Midwesterner, I know that many of the middle-class manufacturing jobs that had been at the heart of our economy are either gone or going, and they're not coming back.

The economic development of industrial society tends inevitably to the ruin of small industries.

There is a trend worth worrying about, which is the disappearance of manufacturing jobs from the workforce. Shortly after World War II, about one-quarter of employed Americans held manufacturing jobs. Now less than one-tenth do. From the perspective of individual businesses, this change is natural and desirable—rising productivity by definition means fewer people making more things. But it is troublesome for society as a whole, since factory jobs have historically buoyed the middle class and given rise to future industries and jobs, virtuous-cycle style.

Growing up in Buffalo, I saw shuttered factories that once housed thousands of steel manufacturing jobs. I remember the hollowing-out of the middle class in our community. I witnessed hope turn to hardship as a once-thriving city reckoned with a fast-changing world.

A lot of the factories that had been the bedrock of many small cities were being shut down, which led me to investigate what I'm calling the 'de-industrial revolution.'

Back in the 1980s parts of our country were devastated by de-industrialisation. This wave of globalisation and the first fruits of technological innovation destroyed industrial jobs or exported them to low-wage economies. The loss of work had a devastating impact.

What's happened is we have lost, over a period of years, short years, 70,000 factories in America.

I'd grown up in a working class neighborhood in Baltimore, a place hard hit by the offshoring of numerous heavy industries - steel, textile, shipbuilding.

When I was starting, there were wool mills in the U.S. that could make you anything. The U.S. used to produce the most beautiful cotton denim in the world. Now all that is gone.

High-profile industry disruptions such as steel or car plant closures attract much media and political attention.

Back in the '80s and '90s, when GM was consistently posting giant profits, they were simultaneously firing tens of thousands of workers in my hometown of Flint and across Michigan.

You cannot buy an American telephone, TV set or VCR. This is a part of America that has gone abroad and will never come back again.

The loss of manufacturing jobs is a sign of economic health.

A young man passes from our public schools to the universities, ignorant almost of the elements of every branch of useful knowledge.

Many large corporations in the last 20 years have decided that their business plan is to shut down manufacturing in Dayton and Toledo and move it to Wuhan and Shenzhen. And then they will sell products back into the United States. It’s a betrayal of this country and a betrayal of the middle class.

While the effect of increased global trade is positive for economies as a whole, specific sectors get battered, and large swathed of unskilled workers find themselves unemployed or under employed.

Like many Americans, my family and I have spent our entire lives at the epicenter of de-industrialization.