america remembers how to make shit

just when you thought america had completely forgotten about heavy industry, manufacturing, and all our other blue-collar jobs that don't involve flipping burgers, peter g gosselin from the los angeles times disagrees.

turns out, all that increasing demand for industrial goods from former mud-hut-dwellers worldwide, coupled with old fixed price deals, allows us to make goods like steel on the cheap. take that, china!

"We're in the midst of 2 to 3 billion people around the world rising out of abject poverty and demanding they have a better living standard," said Daniel R. DiMicco, head of Nucor Corp., America's largest steel company. "That means we've got a 20- to 30-year bull market in basic stuff."

industrial and agricultural profit margins are booming: "Foreign demand has helped drive U.S. Steel from a loss of $420 million five years ago to a nearly $880-million gain last year. Mining giant Freeport-McMoRan's profit is up 1,539%, from $181.7 million to nearly $3 billion. Fertilizer maker Mosaic Co.'s earnings went from $54 million for all of 2003 to $521 million for just the three months ended in February."

meanwhile, the tech boom we've found ourselves in is deflating a little bit, and companies are starting to consolidate as the industry matures - and, i speculate, as our crazy bullshit anti-brown-folk homeland security laws start scaling back that 'brain drain' of ours, making america collectively dumber.

while this will fuck over the coastal states, it bodes well manufacturing-heavy flyover states, whose personal income has risen "6.5% in the last five years. The rest of the country has managed only a 5.4% pace, according to government statistics assembled by Moody's Economy.com." incidentally, this would be awesome if this year's real inflation wasn't 10%.

does this mean we'll pull ourselves out of the recession quickly, and we'll start making a bunch of more money once our nation's economic style turns and runs back to the 1950s?

oops! read the fine print...there's one huge catch:
"While the heartland's revival is producing lots of new revenue and profits for old-economy companies, and while it's marginally pushing up the incomes of their employees, it's not generating lots of new jobs."

so no new jobs are created, the middle class are getting ever-so-slightly richer than other middle class (but still actually getting poorer via inflation), and corporate profit margins are reaching for the sky?

what this says to me is that the economy still sucks, but that this summer, one great american is going to get to fill his special swimming pool up to the brim: