I'm aware that the economy has issues. Anecdotal evidence is a data point, but often an unreliable one.

Our manufacturing capability has decreased dramatically over my lifetime.

"Capability" is a fuzzy word, but I do know manufacturing employment has decreased dramatically, and the trend is a lot more recent than over my lifetime.

Go to this site, click on "Manufacturing Employment - Seasonally Adjusted," and go on to the data page. Click to activate the graph, run the date back to about 1950, and look at that graph. Particularly since 2001.

For another data point, click on "Service-providing Employment - Seasonally Adjusted," or "Total Nonfarm Employment - Seasonally Adjusted" (the employment figure most often quoted), run the dates back to 1950 again, and compare those graphs to the jagged mountain range of the manufacturing employment graph.

I've got no answer for why all these changes happened in manufacturing, and I haven't heard a good one from any economist I've seen discuss the problem. It isn't as simple as politics. I've been trying to identify some major legal or other changes that might have triggered the recent manufacturing trend, and others along the graph, and came up with nothing solid. What happened in 1961? 1975? 1981? 1983? Especially 2001. Knee-jerk partisan answers don't work. Bush did nothing economically that Reagan didn't do, yet manufacturing during the Reagan years held up pretty well compared to the immense drop now. Same for every president since Kennedy, Democrats or Republicans. Wish someone would give this more study. I've spent some hours on that website, going from category to category, trying to shove graphs into the same scales for some kind of clue as to what's been going on for the last fifty years. I think some answers are in there somewhere, but I'd have to work on it full time for a while, not to mention spend way too much time with Excel, and I don't get paid for this.

Another point: Every economist looking at our government budget has identified entitlements as the overwhelming long-term problem. But this is one of those Answers Nobody Wants to Hear, so we'll keep hearing from both parties about other budget issues that in reality, are lost in the noise over the next forty years. If you want an economic threat, this is it, but it's one nobody wants to deal with.