The National Science Board (National Science Foundation) reported on Jan. 17, in its annual "Science and Engineering Indicators," that American high-technology employment is plunging. More than one-quarter of all such high-tech research and manufacturing employment in the United States as of 2000, disappeared by 2011, according to the NSB.

Ignoring President Obama's latest slogan, "in-sourcing manufacturing jobs," his corporate economic advisors are still outsourcing them. The portion of R&D by U.S. multis which is conducted overseas, rose from 16% in 2000 to estimated 29% now. The report quotes 3M, one of the United States' biggest R&D spenders, that it is expanding overseas "in preparation for a world where the West is no longer the dominant manufacturing power."

The "S&E Indicators" is actually a series of long studies of manufacturing, research, labor force, etc., in what is loosely defined as "high technology" engineering and manufacturing. These are some salient high- (or, low-)lights of the reports:

• Since 2000, U.S. high-technology employment has dropped 28%, with the loss of 687,000 productive and essential jobs, down to just 1.8 million currently. Such employment earns more than twice the national median income for all workers.

• American multinational firms have been reducing R&D spending in the United States by 3-4%/year.

• From 1999-2004, U.S. firms established R&D jobs abroad at a relatively slow annual rate of 3%, increasing the share of their R&D employment overseas from 14 to 16%. But from 2004-2009, the number of new R&D jobs overseas took off, growing to 27 percent of all R&D jobs at these U.S. firms. Since 2004, about 85 percent of R&D employment growth in U.S. multinational corporations has been abroad.

• The U.S. share of worldwide high-tech exports has dropped from 22% in 1999 to 15% in 2010.

• Asia's R&D annual spending, which was half the U.S. level in 2000, is now equal to it, $400 billion/year.

• Only 4% of the world's engineering degrees are earned in the United States (half of those, by immigrants) — this is actually slightly less than the American share in the world's population!

As if to illustrate the collapse, the Jan. 19 New York Times ran a major article on Boeing's shock to Wichita, Kansas. The company is closing in Wichita and eliminating 2,200 jobs, just one year after winning the huge Air Force tanker contract and promising to bring in 6-7,000 new ones, at a big ceremony with Sen. Pat Roberts and House Representatives. Prior to these cuts, Wichita aerospace employment — at an average annual income of about $70,000 — had already fallen 33%, from 42,000 to 28,000. "The city is at risk of losing its identity as one of those American places where people make things and are paid well for it," observed the Times — this is actually true for the whole country while Obama preaches about "defense export initiatives" and "in-sourcing".