I guess I learned my bad habits at an early age.  My mother was an unreformed FDR Democrat who thought it her civic duty to tune in and watch every televised speech from the White House.  But every time Richard Nixon’s face came up on the screen, she’d start muttering.  By the time the speech was a few minutes old, she’d be talking just as loud as he was.

Maybe that’s why it seems to me that today’s political advertisements cry out for someone to talk back to them as well.  Columnist Thomas Sowell recently wrote that he even hates the political rhetoric he agrees with.  The flawed premises, distorted facts, and simplistic and infeasible solutions offered by these carefully crafted pieces of propaganda never fail to take us backward in our understanding of the issues that confront us.

Nowhere does that seem more apparent than in issues that deal with the economy.  We’ve evolved over the last two decades into an economy that is increasingly focused on the delivery of services instead of goods.  Manufacturing employment in this country peaked in 1979, beginning a long downward trend that is echoed in the data of every other industrialized nation. 

The goods-producing side of the economy hasn’t really shrunk.  In terms of output, we produce more goods today than we did twenty-five years ago, thanks to significant improvements in productivity.  But the services economy has grown faster. 

At the onset of World War II, economist Zvi Grilliches estimated that about 40 percent of that products bought and sold in the American economy were things that could be weighed and measured.  By 1990 that percentage had fallen to under 20 percent. 

But our rhetoric hasn’t quite caught up with this reality.  Somber faces on television portray the most obvious sign of our economic transformation – the shrinking number of cars in factory parking lots – as a mark of failure, and look for someone to blame.  We are told that manufacturing jobs lost are high wage jobs, and services jobs added are not.  The implication is that the U.S. economy is running off kilter, and that the shifting emphasis of economic activity must be stopped if we are to prosper.

The facts pour cold water on this logic.  For one thing, the U.S. has enjoyed a higher long-term trend growth over the last twenty five years than any other industrialized nation.  By some estimates, the economy’s trend growth will double the standard of living of the average American every thirty years.  If we’re foundering on the rocks, then there are plenty of countries that would like to be there with us.

The high wage status of manufacturing workers also doesn’t stand up to the light of the data.  Consider that Indiana, the most manufacturing intensive state in the nation, paid about 88 cents of wages for every dollar the average U.S. worker earned on 2002.  In fact, the only region within Indiana where overall pay is roughly at parity with thenational average – the Indianapolis metro area – is also the part of the state where manufacturing’s footprint is the smallest.

What’s indisputably true is that manufacturing, particularly in a unionized work setting, typically pays higher entry-level wages for jobs that do not require a college degree than most services employers.  The disparity is large enough that many manufacturing workers whose jobs were cut in the last recession opted out of the labor market altogether.  That’s why the rise in unemployment rates has remained so restrained in the teeth of a recession that wiped out almost 3 million factory jobs

Your television set probably isn’t going to help you understand much about the changing face of the U.S. economy in the next few months.  But it is a reality that the winning candidate will immediately face.