Another week, another debate. As you’ll recall, last week we posted on the fact that not once in the Democratic presidential candidate debate was the word “manufacturing” used, despite the fact that South Carolina, the site of the debate, has lost 91,000 manufacturing jobs since 2000.

Well, this week, we’re on to California, where more than 376,000 manufacturing jobs have been lost (the most of any state in the nation). Will any of the Republican candidates use the “M” word tonight? We hope so, in fact, we’ve publicly called on the candidates to tell us how they plan to address the serious challenges facing American workers and companies.

Additionally, The Politico, which is one of the sponsors of tonight’s debate, is giving voters the chance to submit and vote on questions they’d like to have asked of the candidates tonight. ManufactureThis has submitted a question:

“American manufacturing provides 14 million jobs and generates 80 percent of new patents, but it has challenges: 3 million lost jobs and 40,000 closed facilities, many because of trade with China. Do you have a plan to strengthen manufacturing?”

Click here to get to The Politico’s site, sort the questions by Topic (choose “Trade”), and then look for ManufactureThis.

Hopefully the candidates won’t need prompting from our question to get them to talk such important issues as manufacturing, international trade policy, health care and retirement security for Americans.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 3rd, 2007 at 8:49 pm and is filed under Manufacturing in the U.S., Health Security, Enforcing Trade Laws, Retirement Security, AAM. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.