Listened to a talk Tuesday on how to create jobs in the US. I wrote the following email to the producers of the radio show All Things Considered which air in the afternoon where I live in Northern Virginia. I wrote this in a hurry hoping it might get on the show before it ended so might have a few errors!
Has anyone ever considered that one reason jobs in the US have declined is that we don't manufacture stuff we can sell to other countries? A high percentage of manufacturing in the US is in inches when the rest of the planet is metric, exclusively metric! We run two systems here in the US, both metric and pound inch based. The big 3 in Detroit and every other car manufacturer is 100% metric in design and manufacture, but big trucks, they are inch based, Caterpillar is metric, others, for example trailer manufacturing is inch based. Germany where labor is expensive has a trade surplus; we in the US have a trade deficit. I think it's time we got on with the job of converting; it will mean more jobs for Americans and a reduction in the trade deficit. Plus it wastes a lot of time and money to convert from inches to feet, pounds to ounces and fractions to decimals. What we loose every year due to the inefficiency of using a system invented by the Romans is tremendous, when the much simpler metric system is used by everyone else. Are we stupid or is it just Congress who seem to abrogate their responsibility to mandate a transition. The Reagan administration de-funded the metric transition board and individual members of congress have inserted language into various bills to water down the conversion of this country. Congress has done a tremendous amount of harm to the American economy in this respect. Michael Payne
