Manufacturers lead the way in our one-step-at-a-time recovery

At Maple Plain-based Proto Labs, CEO Brad Cleveland has added 40 workers in recent months and has 10 job openings at the 320-employee, decade-old company.

"Our sales are up about 40 percent this year, and we were flat in 2009," Cleveland said Friday. "If our sales are any indication, new product development has picked up and is accelerating, and they are ordering prototype parts in the United States, Europe and Japan." The company is a global maker of high-tech machined and injection-molded parts for design engineers in several industries. The first hints or growth (or contraction) often come from companies like Proto Labs, which make the things that are needed to make bigger things.

So this is great news for Proto Labs. But it also underscores the unbalanced, halting economic recovery in which manufacturing is the big horse pulling the cart.

"Initial jobless claims have dropped sharply for [the Minnesota manufacturing sector]," Wells Fargo senior economist Scott Anderson wrote in a Friday report. "And exports rose sharply ... especially to Asia, Canada and the Middle East. Signs of economic recovery are coalescing. Yet the state's growth is likely to remain somewhat disappointing over the coming year as Minnesota consumers continue to repair their balance sheets and the state's housing market remains moribund."

In short, we're starting to climb out of the hole that cost 143,000 Minnesota jobs, or 5 percent of total employment, between October 2007 and last summer. But the debacle created by greedy financiers, gutless regulators and overleveraged consumers is going to take longer to shake out.

"We're in far better shape than we were last year," Anderson said. Particularly if you've hung on to a job and kept a roof over your head.

But during these steamy, dog days of summer, it sure doesn't feel like we're making much progress.

President Obama is taking it on the chin and probably could get whupped by Donald Duck if the election were held today. Obama's big mistake was "overpromising in a situation where it was very difficult for anyone to deliver," economist Gary Shilling told the Internet finance program "Tech Ticker" on Thursday.

Despite the stimulus spending that helped keep a few million working and the 2009 emergency tax cuts, it's just going to take longer for indebted, cash-strapped Americans to recover.

"It isn't just that 2008 was a bad dream from which we've awoken and it's back to business as usual," said Shilling, a conservative numbers caller who predicts the economy will grow only 2 percent annually over the next 10 years. But it takes 3 percent growth to put a dent in the 9.5 percent unemployment rate in America.

A slew of national commentators and columnists wrote this week about why the stock market and economy are going nowhere for the rest of the year. The mood on Wall Street has soured. Congress will do nothing before the midterm elections, which may be a good thing.

Richard Davis, the CEO of U.S. Bancorp, a guy who worked his way from teller to boss over 30 years, was telling several hundred Minneapolis high school kids this week who were completing valuable summer internships with area employers to keep the faith, finish high school and go on to college or work-training programs.

We're deleveraging, restructuring and the big companies are making lots of money again. But they are the most cautious in their outlook and hiring.

The good news: There are a lot of Brad Clevelands in the industrial, next-generation technology, alternative energy and other industries who are rolling out game-changing innovations, products and strategies that eventually will drive a more-sustainable, job-growing economy.