Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
The problem is one of dismissive attitude towards the ones who build the pyramids. The middle class gets told to buck up and figure out their knowledge job education right ricky tick, or face irrelevancy. So the rats pedal faster in order to attain socioeconomic parity with their parents. In general the trend is one of diminishing musical chairs. Some make it and blame the others of being morally bankrupt and lazy.
But, and more importantly, for the median millions who will never have the aptitude to be able to successfully complete that kind of education, and even if they did would find themselves woefully under-networked, the picture this Country now has painted for them is: "sucks to be you".
That's not good enough. The upper class and middle upper class relies on the obedience and general safety provided on the backs of these underclassmen in order to enjoy the semblance of First World Order America has grown accustomed to. We cannot continue to institutionally marginalize the proles by suggesting a flippant "go to dental school/IT job training/medical training ya slob" as if to suggest the economy could even support everybody on such an economic level. Someone a couple posts back hit it on the head. What's gonna happen is that the proles are gonna vote themselves in a benefit package in order to bridge over the economic deficit afflicting their personal lives. Nobody comes out of this alive. The proles aren't simply gonna smile for some PBS documentary and then going to go lie under a bridge and die quietly and obediently. Hell no, they're gonna torch away your ability to enjoy whatever personal measure of economic prosperity you've been able to secure for yourself in this Country. We're all in this slave ship together. The sooner we get our multi-nationals on a path to re-investing that stolen percentage of the underclass' labor value back to the labor force, in the form of WAGES this time (not credit), the better off we'll be for the sustaining of our social appeasement.
That is basic governance by the way. Nobody is suggesting a castle for every man. But you can't dismiss your underclass this way and expect to keep a lawful and obedient/peaceful Country. And I for one welcome the poverty-stricken budget crushing increasing reliance on government entitlements to rattle our collective lives back into prioritizing the keeping of our neighbors.
The service economy was NOT a progressive improvement over the industrial economy. The service economy is indicative of a maturing declining rich country...like Spain, Greece or Ireland. To have a US-sized Spain is a scary proposition for the World. We don't need that kind of dispossession. We need to step back from the service economy.
Thoughtful post.
Regarding the bolded part, I'm not so sure when or even if this would happen. Consider how strong the narrative is that has had people voting against their own interests. It would take a helluva grass roots movement to have any impact, a movement that will get considerable push back.
Your post reminded me of the gentleman that was now 60, and doing whatever he could to keep working, because he can't retire. The lesson was that if you don't work for one company, which almost nobody does anymore, then that means you'll work til you drop - or you get on disability, like a lot are doing today.
The system is going to break. I can't imagine what retirement is going to look like in the future, if there will be such a thing.
Not necessarily. With a 401k, I'll retire in my mid 60s, having worked for several companies. IF I change jobs between now and than, I'll roll over my 401k into my new corp's plan.
It's a symptom of the flight of formerly good paying jobs out of the country, along with the killing of many other domestic jobs. What else are they going to do? Kinda like that formerly well paid welder you once talked about at your company. She was a welder, but now a robot is doing her job. What else is she going to do?.
It isn't my company-its a family friend at a different company. She works as an assmbler at the same plant. It was a drop of several dollars an hour in pay,less OT, but the same excellent benefits.
I noticed in posts that came after this you take the approach that this is work for students or people to do and no one should really be able to support themselves on retail wages. The problem here is that the steel mills are gone. Manufacturing in general requires fewer people to run a plant and produce products. Meanwhile, the GDP of this country has increased, but wages for people on the bottom are stagnant or declining. Not everyone has the aptitude to be a computer engineer or work a skilled job in the IT sector of the economy. Are these people condemned to perpetual poverty?.
[/quote]
Not everyone has the attitude, but tens of millions do, and they are choosing not to maximize their potential. We need to stop subsidizng those lifestyle choices, for the same reason an intelligent man doesn't give a wino another bottle. We need regions who value high school linebacker experience above all else including education to wise up and smell the roses. Stop producing the next Al Bundys' selling shoes, and recalling their hs football game as their lone achievement.
If that occured, the true much smaller pool of those unable to move up the food chain could be taken care of, without draconian taxation of the productive. Those choosing to be Al Bundy's are draining resources away at far too high a clip.
The white woman losing her home does not make much sense. She says that she owned it for 24 years yet has no equity in it? If she bought it 24 years ago then it should be close to paid off. Some information seems to be omitted here - I bet she took out home equity during the bubble and blew it all away just like loads of others and now we should be feeling sorry for these people?
If she bought 24 years ago her cost basis for shelter based on comparable rents should be a fraction given how much inflation there has been in housing costs.
Export based economy with high capacity industrial sectors leading the way. This may upset our foreign debt holders, i.e. China. of course. Nobody is getting appeased when 69 million welfare cases drudge through walmart jobs and a few corporate types in aggregate are the only ones to enjoy the time to smell the roses.
Wouldn't that be sweet? The problem is, nobody has the money to buy much of anything we might produce, at least as far as I can see.
Quote:
Originally Posted by hindsight2020
EDIT: To add. What do YOU suggest?
I wish I had an answer. I don't know how to solve our country's issues. I'm probably extremist in that I believe all this focus on growth and production is wrong. We should be focused on increasing our standard of living as a whole, and I believe working LESS hours as a whole would be good for everyone's well being.
A single farmer, given the proper capital, can feed how many THOUSANDS of people? Labor just isn't what it once was. We can no longer throw more people at a problem to solve it. China is now finding out this same problem, as wages there are rising even faster than ours are falling.
Unfortunately, not everyone is qualified to be a Rocket Surgeon*. Sooner or later those will be the only jobs left in the whole world. This will take a century or two. I think it is easy to forget just how quickly the USA got to this point in development. Asia is quickly developing to the same point we have achieved. Africa, the next source of cheap labor, won't be far behind.
We're going to need to come up with some other societal goal than work. I like a lot of the ideas behind energy or resource based economies, but one needs to think global for those ideas to achieve possibility, and we're not mature enough for that yet.
*Rocket Surgeon - generic term for extremely highly skilled job
Funny how I keep hearing how bad it is out there. Here is a cool article for those that may be interested on how things are for many many Americans and the numbers are growing.
The problem here lies in the number of poorer households who become poorer still in the process of assuring that these relatively few households become ever more wealthy. Put into a few words, we are simply doing it wrong in this country.
Both Democrats and Republicans have been proponents (and signers) of "Free Trade Agreements". These do nothing but hand benefits for big business to capitalize on third world cheap labor.
No, they do much mroe than that. You need to read more.
Quote:
Originally Posted by AJNEOA
The USA used to have a tarrif on imports...
We still do have zillions of tarriffs. You can look them up HERE...
Quote:
Originally Posted by AJNEOA
which allows local labor to prosper...
Allowing outmoded products and processes to continue does not actually benefit anyone. The tariffs you envision merely take money from certain consumers and give it to certain rpoducers. It is simply a tax called by a different name when an actual tax could do the same job much more efficiently while also allowing the production base to modernize itself.
Quote:
Originally Posted by AJNEOA
This is an easy fix, and it doesn't need a 2,000 page bill on "Immigration Reform". The US government should target businesses that are employing illegal labor and fine HARD. It's like Field of Dreams, if you don't build it, they won't come.
The only things that have kept them from coming were the Great Depression and WWII, in each case because travel in general became so much more difficult to accomplish. While you might imagine that there is, no one is putting any rational thught or intelligince into the matter of where the line dividing legal from illegal immigration ought to fall. Many are called and then many are chosen. Whether the system was adequate to the task of getting all of the the proper pieces of paper passed out to the many does not and will not much enter into it.
I remember an exchange in a political science class taught in the 1960s at a "top 10" university. The professor was a typical left-wing boob (it was cool to be a commie in those days, and evidently still is among some of the geriatric leftovers posting here). One day he avowed something like "rich parents manage to rig things so that their kids wind up rich, although I don't know exactly how" -- evidently, he didn't know much about genetics. One of my classmates answered him by pointing out "yes, they hire guys like you to teach us."
Nice work, Aesop. But the butthurt doesn't appear to have gotten any better. Bummer. It's starting to look like that's a long-term and perhaps incurable condition.
Capitalism over the past 100 years or so has helped indoctrinate multiple generations into a far more insideous belief system (almost a religion, if you will) of "consumerism". This is the pervasive belief by most in society that they need to be able to acquire things far beyond what is required for their basic survival and well being in order to achieve happiness, by way of status. It has crept into our collective subconscious and infected the populace almost enough to bring this country down to it's knees, as is now happening. It's gotten worse with each succeeding generation, too, except now the resources (educated human capital, production economies, and resources) have been strained to the point where it's simply unsustainable, and has been for some time. People want more. They want to keep up with the Joneses. However, they have been let down partially by social breakdown, partially by greed, and partially by simple economics.
It's going to take some time to reach a happy medium. Likely many decades of fits and starts wherein a new bubble (internet bubble, finance/real estate, energy?) allows for temporary collective euphoria and prosperity followed by a thunderous crash as we are all brought back down to reality...
Eventually, assuming our collective societal memory allows for it, there will come a point when the global population can no longer be sustained at a certain expected standard of living. There will have to come an acceptance of a "new normal" (that popular recent term among the economic "gurus"). That new normal will have to occur if there is any hope of a sustainable human society. That new normal will be achieved with the acceptance of a lower standard of living as the sacrifice for worldwide safety, on the basis that everything else we have tried has not worked. That would imply that humanity is capable of progressing to such a high level of moral consciousness, which is a stretch (as history would indicate).
The alternative future is much more bleak. That's the one where as too many nations attempt to achieve "First World" status and go through their growing pains, there leaves little choice but for those nations with the might and means to do so to either exploit economically or take by force the few remaining bastions of cheap labor and resources. This would come at great environmental and human peril - at a much larger scale than ever before in history, if only for the fact that there has never been this level of technology, this amount of people to be fed and appeased, and so few natural resources available in world history. There may be a few nations left standing when it's all said and done, but there would be so few resources left by that time that whomever is the "victor" will achieve a very short lived prosperity anyway.
As resources are exhausted for building civilizations, civilization would again revert to a more primitive and localized version of itself once again. Of course, this could be 100, 200, or 300 years into the future. I wouldn't expect it to take much longer than that given how much society has changed even in the past 100 years, and how the rate of technological change nad environmental strain has been increasing almost exponentially with each passing generation.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
