Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, was recently asked why his company moved its production to China. “It’s skill”, said Cook in response to Charlie Rose on 60 Minutes. “The U.S., over time, began to stop having as many vocational kind of skills” he said. “I mean, you can take every tool and die maker in the United States and probably put them in a room that we’re currently sitting in. In China, you would have to have multiple football fields.”

A football field is 360 feet long and 160 feet wide for a total of 57,600 square feet.

Apple’s CEO was wrong. The reason the US public schools probably stopped funding vocational programs that trained, for instance, these tool and die makers Cook mentions, is because U.S. corporations left the U.S. for cheaper labor. And when those U.S. manufacturers left, the need for more tool and die jobs dropped…