This is how big the change is: According to economists at Alliance Capital Management, manufacturing jobs are not merely moving out of our own country. They're disappearing almost everywhere.

"Between 1995 and 2002 roughly 22 million [manufacturing] jobs were lost globally, a decline of 11 percent," a new ACM report stated. "Yet over the same period, global industrial production jumped more than 30 percent -- a remarkable gain in productivity."

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While manufacturing jobs decline, employment in the service industries is doing just the opposite. Between 1996 and 2001, service employment in this country grew by 19 percent. Those two trends -- the rise in service jobs and the fall in manufacturing employment -- are likely to continue for years.

If so, the implications will be enormous. Unlike manufacturing jobs, for example, service jobs do not typically provide either health insurance or pension benefits. So the decline in manufacturing is also contributing to the decline in the number of Americans with employer-provided health insurance and employer-provided pensions.

Pensions and health insurance are critically important portions of the social safety net. If changes in the economy make it impossible to fund those programs through private enterprise, they will either have to be replaced by government, or they will not exist.