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Manufacturing is no more or less important than any other sector, however the advantage of manufacturing is that it can impact trade.
50 pizza shop may hire 200 people but all of them get paid by Americans and the customers are all Americans, while many of the ingredients may well be imported.
You can't send pizzas to other countries.
On the other hand, if we manufacture a widget, the same dollars may only result in 5 jobs rather than 200, but when we sell a widget to a foreign customer we bring in revenue and expand our economy.
In the last 20 years the vast majority of our consumer exports have been increasingly digital. Movies, software, games, etc... Blizzard may only have a few hundred well-paid employees but they also bring a boatload of cash in from other countries. As you know, digital products are now pirated and stolen at an absurd rate. Our government is unaware, unable and disinterested in actually protecting digital manufacturers. That makes manufcture of physical goods even more important to our international trade balance.
We ought to be doing much better analysis of our spending. Any sharp webmaster puts more effort into tracking his $/click than our government puts into tracking huge expenditures. Bill Gates did a very worthwhil TED lecture on th lack of monetary tracking by our government. The spending side of the equation ought to have it's own thread, and I assure you manufacture of physical good warrants more investment than many ventures that would create a greater number of short term jobs.
The jobs problem won't be fixed by investment. Stimulus is not going to fix unemployment, it may prevent a depression and spur a recovery but it won't fix the fundamental long term problem. We simply do not have enough work for everyone who is willing and able to work. That problem will get worse over time. Businesses are growing more efficient at an insane pace. Only a decade or two ago people used to mail letters or send a fax. Nobody had a cell phone. You needed a secretarial pool. A computer spreadsheet was magic to most people. Payroll departments existed before ADP. Technology builds on itself and gains momentum exponentially. Does anyone really think in 100 years we will have jobs requiring all capable workers in a society of 300+ million?
The jobs issue will only be fixed with fundamental changes like 4 day work week, free (yes entirely free) minimal housing, food, transport and utilities for non-workers. The start of it will likely be large tax incentives for families where one spouse stays home to raise their kids. They will sell it as restoring the American family but in reality it will be a way of paying people not to compete for jobs.
We pay people based on production because there has always been demand for production. In many sectors that demand is already dying, gmail replaces most of the postal service.... When production is no longer in demand our method of assigning value can not continue to be solely based on employment payrolls.
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