Goods Producers and Their Disproportionate Value

My materials analysis laboratory, Anderson Materials Evaluation, Inc., exists to support the producers of goods in the USA.  I consider this mission to be a noble one.  To be sure, we provide research and development services to institutions other than manufacturers, provide quality control verifications of their supplies for service providers, and we provide some environmental safety evaluations as well.  However, the core of our business is assisting manufacturers with their materials problems and processing concerns and their product development.

Compared to the employment of private sector service providers and even of government employees, the number of goods producers are a beset minority.  The Federal Reserve of St. Louis provides the data:

As of December 2025, there were 21,477,000 goods-producing workers and 113,613,000 service workers in the private sector.  The total number of government “workers” was 23,359,000.  The goods-producers were outnumbered by these government employees by almost 1.9 million.  The ratio of private sector service providers to private sector goods-producers was 5.29.

Let us examine how households actually spend their money.  We will again turn to the data of the Federal Reserve of St. Louis:

The ratio of money spent on services to that spent on goods is only 2.24 as of December 2025.  This is much smaller than the ratio of service providers to goods producers of 5.29.

One cannot say that an American goods-producer is thereby 5.29/2.24 = 2.36 times more valuable than an American service provider in the economy.  Many of the goods consumed by U.S. households are produced in countries using slave labor or very low cost labor, or by heavily subsidized and little-regulated industries.  Those are advantages that my laboratory tries to help American manufacturers overcome by helping them produce superior goods at lower production costs so they can tap into this value of goods to households that is revealed by their spending choices. 

Since 2005, the number of goods-producing Americans has been relatively constant, aside from dips in and shortly after recessions.  Despite that, the value of American goods has increased.  With good energy policies that take advantage of our tremendous carbon-based fuel resources to provide low cost and highly reliable energy, with reductions in the cost (burden) of government which in 2025 was 37.7% of GDP, and with further reductions in the number of irrational government regulations, American goods-producers could grow in number and the value of American manufacturing could grow faster than it has.  The potential is there.