Losing 15 Factories a Day

I came across this unfortunate statistic in Cleveland's Plain Dealer newspaper. Rep. Betty Sutton of Ohio recently stated: "Every day in the United States, we are losing 15 factories." The paper's PolitiFact editor checked out the numbers with the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages. While the rate varied from year to year, over the 10 year period from 2001 to 2010, the United States lost 56,190 manufacturing facilities, or a daily average of 15 plants. Sutton is correct, and it's a national tragedy.