A “snowball” problem for America that just won’t go away could be a blessing in disguise for astute investors… Manufacturing jobs have fallen steadily since the 1950s. Low-wage countries, especially China, have been the center of the movement of factory work and job creation out and away from the United States. In the 1960s, manufacturer United States Steel Corporation (NYSE/X) employed over 225,000 factory workers, Westinghouse Electric, had 114,000, and General Motors Company (NYSE/GM) employed over 595,000 factory workers. The center of job creation in America was manufacturing. Today, service companies in the U.S. dominate the economic landscape when it comes to job creation: United Parcel Service, Inc. (NYSE/UPS) employs over 400,000 people; Target Corporation (NYSE/TGT), 355,000; and Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (NYSE/WMT) has 2,100,000 service employees on its payroll. From what I can see, job creation over the past three years has been in the service sector (with heavy emphasis on retail) and at the government level. In his State of the Union address last week, the President was adamant about wanting manufacturing jobs to come back to America. It will probably be a major part of his re-election campaign, in a bid to spur job creation, which is sorely needed in this country. But how can it possibly happen? Isn’t it a pipedream that manufacturing jobs will return to America so the job creation engine will start running again? China’s development and rapid job creation have led to wages rising at least 15% per annum in recent years, which means that, within five years, the cost savings to manufacturers of producing in China as compared to the U.S. will be minimal (source: Boston Consulting Group). But manufacturers have a choice if labor gets too expense in China. They can simply move their factories to other less-developed economies where wages are rock-bottom and job creation is sorely needed. Why move back to America? The only way to stimulate job creation by creating manufacturing jobs here in the U.S. would be to revamp healthcare costs and our tax structure in order to make the U.S. an attractive place to invest. The other major factor in determining a plant location for manufacturers is a weak currency. One cannot understate the importance of exchange rate currency costs in setting up a manufacturing plant. The reason China, India and other such developing countries were able to lure manufacturing jobs away in the first place, and so create the foundation for a surge in job creation was a favorable exchange rate to the once mighty U.S. dollar. Have the tables turned? Is it just a coincidence that, in the same week as the State of the Union address, the Fed came …