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It's widely known as the fiscal cliff, but some prominent Republicans have been calling it a "debt crisis." Economists agree such a crisis may be coming, but it's not here yet. Demographic changes are forcing a reckoning of how to pay for what people want from their government.

President Barack Obama traveled to Redford, Mich., on Monday to carry on his campaign to cut a budget deal with House Republicans that includes raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans. He spoke to workers at a diesel facility.

The Orange Country Register in suburban Los Angeles is expanding its newsroom. Not only that — the owners are emphasizing print, not digital.

In the past few weeks, longtime Register editor Ken Brusic has hired some two-dozen positions: critics to review food, TV and cars, a society columnist and investigative reporters. He's still looking for a movie critic, a magazine writer and many more reporters.

"We haven't seen this kind of hiring since the early '90s," he says. That was before the digital age, when newspapers were still hugely profitable.

At the Register's headquarters, it sounds like a different era. The Register's presses whir nearly 24 hours a day.

They're printing more color, more pages: double the editorial section, two weekly high school sports sections and a new daily business section.

Brusic doesn't think people stopped subscribing to newspapers because they didn't want to read them. He thinks it's because publishers made too many cutbacks.

"They've been offering less and attempting, in some cases, to charge more for it. And people are smart. People won't put up for that sort of thing," he says. "So we're now offering more."

The Financial Puzzle

Brusic has been at the Register for more than two decades, much of which was marked by big layoffs.

Three years ago, the paper went into bankruptcy, but the changing economics of the industry were only part of the problem. The owners had saddled the paper with hundreds of millions in debt, and then cashed out.

The Two-Way

Murdoch's News Corp. Shuts Down 'The Daily'

The advantages to making products in the U.S. are starting to stack up — and companies are taking notice. Among them are Apple, which announced Thursday it plans to start producing some of its Mac computers here instead of in China, and General Electric, which is making big investments at home.

It's not just a matter of publicity, either. As the December issue of The Atlantic reports, companies are seeing real economic advantages to "insourcing," a reversal of the outsourcing trends that sent U.S. manufacturing overseas.

A New Approach

General Electric opened Appliance Park in Louisville, Ky., in 1951, but lately it has been making some changes there. In August, the company announced an $800 million investment in jobs, products and the manufacturing process itself.

Back in 2008, Rich Calvaruso gathered his team at Appliance Park and told them they had to rethink the dishwasher. As a "Lean" leader, Calvaruso's job is to figure out how to make things more efficiently. So he asked a team of factory workers, designers and marketers to put their heads together. They managed to cut down the time it takes to build the dishwasher by one-third.

The dishwasher's orientation was the key. When it was set up a certain way, operators down the line could do their work without spending time manipulating the washer itself.

Even though it now takes fewer people to make that dishwasher, not a single person was laid off. Calvaruso tells Guy Raz, host of weekends on All Things Considered, that those employees were freed up to work in other parts of the company.

Hoodies Made At Home

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