Source : Forbes

Acording to Forbes ,The manufacturing sector has been one of the brighter parts of the U.S. economy since the end of the Great Recession. In 2010, American manufacturers added value of $1.7 trillion to the U.S. economy, up 6.6% over the previous year after accounting for inflation. By the same measure, the rest of the economy grew by 2.2%.
You might not know it from public commentary, but the United States manufactures more than any other country (including China), and U.S. factories are within reach of their all-time greatest output–a record they set in 2000 and came close to reaching again in 2007

With that growth have come some jobs–about 120,000 new factory jobs in 2011 by the estimate of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the first year-over-year increase in manufacturing employment since 1998. But that increase, while welcome for those workers who now have a job, barely changes the larger trend: 11.8 million Americans work in manufacturing today, down 40% from peak manufacturing employment in June 1979.

The country’s biggest manufacturing state is  California, whose factories make everything from Hershey‘s chocolates to spiral pipe from United States Steel.