The rate of unemployment and the lack of jobs have bedeviled Americans for over four years now. Although under 8 percent, the jobless rate remains stubbornly high and yet, there appears to be plenty of work - if you have the skills to qualify.

"There is a mismatch between the jobs that are available and the people that we are interviewing," explained the chief executive of a huge German engineering firm, looking to hire skilled manufacturing workers.

It is the same story wherever you go. If you can believe the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there was a shortage of 7 million skilled workers in America as of two years ago and that number is increasing. They are forecasting that shortage will balloon to 21 million skilled workers by 2020.

Most scholars will tell you that the lack of education within the American work force is behind these depressing numbers. To make matters worse, the average education of U.S. workers is expected to decline over the next 10 years, which will further widen the gap between supply and demand for skilled help.

Readers who have been reading my columns understand that the rising cost of higher education is now beyond the means of more and more Americans. At the same time, the vast majority of the work force is making less in 2012 dollars than their fathers did. One major reason for this trend is that low-wage work constitutes a growing share of the jobs produced by the U.S. economy.

The Labor Department forecasts that among the top 30 occupations that will add the greatest number of jobs between 2010 and 2020, 24 typically require only a high school degree or less. Only six occupations, among them registered nurses, elementary teachers and accountants, require more.

Yet scholars, politicians and pundits alike keep pointing to increased education as the answer to reducing unemployment. Many workers have dutifully followed that advice only to discover that many would-be employers now consider them overqualified. The jobs available for the most part are in openings for cashiers, home health aides, retail sales persons and the like.

Other jobs, such as long-haul truck drivers or manufacturing jobs demand a certain combination of skills that blend both technical as well as academic training. I believe as more and more college-educated workers realize that they must also incorporate some technical training in their resumes, those jobs will be filled. Many corporations are also realizing that fact and are providing training in those technical skills to new workers.

Most recent estimates indicate that the U.S. manufacturing sector is short roughly 80,000 to 100,000 highly skilled workers. That sounds like a lot but it is actually only one percent of the manufacturing sector's work force, according to the Boston Consulting Group. But it does represent almost 8 percent of the skilled workers in that sector.

When you delve into the figures behind the shortages, one realizes that only seven states show a real gap in skilled manufacturing labor know-how. Therefore, the skills gap is largely a local and not a national shortage. Much of the so-called shortage is of some corporations' own making. It is natural when planning a factory or plant in a new location to seek an area where the lowest cost wages and tax structure prevail. It was one of the reasons that foreign auto manufacturers selected the Deep South to establish their U.S. operations.

What companies fail to recognize is that a major reason for a region or state's low labor costs are the lack of skills and education provided by that work force. You can't deliberately locate your plant in an area that abounds with unskilled labor and then bemoan that same lack of skills.

Don't get me wrong, there is a gap in skilled labor in this country but it is not as large as some would have you believe. Hopefully, as time goes by, more and more manufacturing jobs will return to this country and as they do, those jobs will be filled by Americans. There may be a time lag, such as the one we are experiencing today, but the gaps will be filled and quickly.

There was a time when an announcement of further easing from the Federal Reserve would have sent the markets soaring. This week the Fed promised more monetary stimulation and the markets finished flat to down.

Even more puzzling was gold's reaction to the announcement. The Fed is planning to purchase $85 billion a month in mortgage-backed securities, effectively pumping even more money into the economy. That money, unlike its previous bond-buying program, which bought long Treasury bonds and sold short ones, will involve printing new money. That is normally considered inflationary and yet gold prices barely budged. The next morning gold promptly fell $20 an ounce.

In a historic move, the Fed also tied interest rates to the jobless rate, promising that until unemployment came down to a 6.5 percent rate, it would keep interest rates at a near-zero level. The market's response was a big "so what." Investors do not believe that these latest Fed actions will do anything to reduce the number of Americans out of work or increase the growth rate of the economy.

The economy has been functioning under a historically low interest rate environment for some time. These low rates have been effective in avoiding another recession and keeping unemployment from rising further. But maintaining the status quo is not enough. In order to add jobs, the economy has to grow faster and that's not happening.

Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, has often said the central bank can do only so much. In order to accomplish a high-growth, low-unemployment economy, he maintains fiscal stimulus is absolutely necessary in tandem with lower rates. I agree.

But the Fiscal Cliff is not about cutting taxes and higher spending. It's about avoiding tax increases and cutting spending. Those actions seem to be at odds with what the central bankers are saying. The Republicans continue to insist that spending is the problem and that President Obama and the Democrats want tax cuts but little in spending cuts.

Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner, on Thursday, continued to insist "that the right direction is cutting spending and reducing debt."

How dense can one be? Has Boehner and the tea party bothered to look at how well that recipe hast worked in Europe over the last two years? It has been a disaster. It was also a disaster in Latin America throughout the 1980s. It flies in the face of what our central bankers are saying as well.

Boehner argued that if you include President Obama's new proposals to increase spending in areas that could stimulate the economy, then there would be practically no spending cuts at all in his Fiscal Cliff deal. Well, hurrah for the president.

I had hoped that if President Obama was re-elected, we could avoid the worst. The Bush tax cuts would be extended and the GOP's insistence during the election campaign (and up to and including yesterday) that we needed deep spending cuts would be moderated. So far the jury is out on my bet.

You may disagree, but I firmly believe that more, not less fiscal spending is absolutely imperative to jump starting the economy in tandem with the central bank's monetary policies at the present time. I will worry about the deficit after the economy is growing at a healthy rate and unemployment drops. At that point, I believe the explosion in tax revenues from a growing, full-employment economy will take care of the deficit, the debt and the Republican's propensity to angst. Until then, don't sweat the deficit, stay long and bet on avoiding the Fiscal Cliff.

In this brave new world of ours, it is no longer enough to simply offer the lowest cost product. Product innovation is now critical to a company's success. U.S. companies are discovering it is becoming harder to innovate when their manufacturing plants are half a world away.

Just look at the competition in hand-held devices, medical technology, and a plethora of other high-tech products, the highest sales go to the innovators with the most dependable products. But innovation doesn't stop there. Increasingly, even basic manufacturing products from wing nuts to autos are experiencing a transformation. Corporate teams of designers, engineers and workers on the assembly line find themselves collaborating like never before to produce a smaller, sleeker and more energy-efficient mouse trap, just like they did in the days of Henry Ford.

In order to do that, many companies are realizing that they need their manufacturing processes and factories closer to home. That realization is fueling an "insourcing" of jobs and manufacturing back to America. That's good news for the future of this country and its workforce.

Readers may recall my column, "Made in America Returns" back in June of this year. In that article, I attributed the renaissance in American manufacturing to lower energy and transportation costs here at home as well as the narrowing of labor costs between American workers and those unskilled workers of China and other emerging economies.

But that is not the entire story. A recent article in The Atlantic by Charles Fishman, titled "The Insourcing Boom," caught my eye. He chronicled the recent experiences of General Electric in transforming its defunct Appliance Park, Ky., manufacturing headquarters into today's cutting-edge producer of basic products like water heaters, refrigerators and dishwashers.

As a resident of Pittsfield, anything "GE" is of interest to me and my clients. Back in the day, Pittsfield was the headquarters of this red, white and blue manufacturing juggernaut. That is until Jack Welch, its former CEO, got it into his mind to ship most of our manufacturing jobs off to China and other cheap labor centers 30-some years ago. The same thing happened to Appliance Park. Both towns were devastated. Pittsfield is only now beginning to recover.

Appliance Park, on the other hand, is actually undergoing a revival of its original purpose, manufacturing American-made appliances, thanks to some recent discoveries by present GE management and its current CEO Jeffrey Immelt. After failing to sell the facility in 2008, management resolved to "make it work" at the huge six-factory complex. It soon realized that they could make highly efficient, higher-quality appliances here at home at a lower cost than could be produced elsewhere.

The key, as more and more companies are beginning to understand, to creating truly innovative products, regardless of their nature, at a reasonable price, is having all the pieces of the product creation puzzle in the same place. Over the past few decades that principle was lost and forgotten as U.S. companies rushed overseas to take advantage of cheap labor. In today's marketplace, however, cost is taking a back seat over quality and innovation; something more and more consumers are demanding and willing to pay for.

Input from those in the manufacturing process is becoming integral to engineering and designing a better, more competitive product. You can’t do that when your widget is being made on a Chinese or Indian factory floor in a different time zone, by workers who can't speak English. Although this trend should benefit our own workers, the question to ask is:

Is our workforce prepared for that challenge and opportunity?  In my next column we will address the issue of skilled workers, or the lack thereof, in America.