how much engineering and programming we need?

"Without a manufacturing base, have we reached the limit of how much engineering and programming we need?

All this b.s. about North America doing the technological development whilst we "let" other countries do the manufacturing and dirty jobs means nothing when they have hundreds of thousands of engineers available to do their own development work, regardless of how badly or slowly they do the job.

Did you see that Chinese bridge building automaton yesterday? They are now years ahead of us."
https://www.google.ca/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=chinese%20bridge%20maqchine