Agreed, U.S. manufacturing is long gone and not coming back. The rust belt cities are going to have to figure out how to reinvent themselves for this century. This has be obvious for the last 30 years, a little planning would have been nice. It can be done, Pittsburgh did it in the 80s/90s and is now doing pretty well.

The "hundreds of thousands of high paying value added jobs that built and sustained the middle class" were a large part of the problem. Domestic manufacturing companies never learned to control their labor cost, so they're gone. The real "value added" isn't in the manufacturing, that can be done anyplace.