The Washington Post's Harold Meyerson, in a bit of anti-free trade populism, writes, in part:

Manufacturing (as Kevin Phillips points out in the forthcoming issue of the American Prospect, which I edit) accounted for 25 percent of America's gross domestic product in the 1970s but just 12 percent in 2006.

However, as economist Don Boudreaux points out in an e-mail (and Russell Roberts writes in a post), total manufacturing output in the US has increased by over 55% since 1987, with most of that increase coming after NAFTA was passed.

Here is a chart depicting manufacturing output:



So, while manufacturing output increased, its share of GDP went down, indicating that other sectors grew more robustly than did manufacturing, not, as Meyerson seems to be trying to imply, because manufacturing output shrank.