After reading this New York Times article this morning regarding why we cannot build iPhones in America, what comes to mind are the two sides of the coin while I was in high school (early 1990's). One side of the coin said that all we had to do to be successful was get through a few years of school and what awaited us was a lifetime of great furniture industry jobs. This was in the heyday of thousands of furniture jobs showing up in North Mississippi.

The other side of the coin was that we needed to do our best to get into a great college, learn a real skill, and apply ourselves for something better than manufacturing work. Programming, financial, and medical careers were the ideas given to us.

Many of my friends who chose the former are now without jobs because those jobs have moved overseas to cheaper labor. Labor that can easily modify to building new items; labor without unions.

Those of us who chose the latter are doing quite well and if we look, we can definitely see the divide between those who took the quick dollar into furniture and those who applied themselves for something more skilled.

It's happening again even now. We have a huge Toyota plant that has now opened, and many people are again looking to the quick dollar and planning a career of working in manufacturing there or at one of the numerous suppliers around town. Don't get me wrong; those are great jobs. But a few years down the road when Japan decides that the cost of US labor is too much compared to the tariffs charged to import their cars, those positions will be gone again.

We can build certain items in America. We can build Toyotas, Hondas, BMW, and the like because our government charges a huge tariff to import those cars, making it more profitable to build a plant in America. The same goes for other products that are built here. If you see a manufacturing plant still in existence, its because the price of importing from another country is still too high to make it work.

What we can do is innovate. We still have the expertise to create new technologies and we have the best schools and the best of the experts to help new employees learn the skills they need to find the new technologies that the world will need to continue growing.

There will always be manufacturing jobs in America. There will always be items that just cannot be built anywhere else but here. But depending upon manufacturing to provide a middle-class income is faulty from the start going forward from today.

B. Daniels is the lead review expert with Find Cheap Bargains. B. was more than likely the person responsible for the hands-on review of every product on the site. He also spends time searching for sale bargains when not conducting and writing the reviews.