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The rest of the story for good old Bill |
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wasteful
MUSA Citizen Joined: Jul 27 2009 Status: Offline Points: 793 |
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Posted: Jul 25 2010 at 7:00am |
The Middle Class in America Is Radically Shrinking. Here Are the Stats to Prove it
From The Business Insider
Editor's note: Michael Snyder is editor of theeconomiccollapseblog.com The 22 statistics detailed here prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the middle class is being systematically wiped out of existence in America. The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer at a staggering rate. Once upon a time, the United States had the largest and most prosperous middle class in the history of the world, but now that is changing at a blinding pace. So why are we witnessing such fundamental changes? Well, the globalism and "free trade" that our politicians and business leaders insisted would be so good for us have had some rather nasty side effects. It turns out that they didn't tell us that the "global economy" would mean that middle class American workers would eventually have to directly compete for jobs with people on the other side of the world where there is no minimum wage and very few regulations. The big global corporations have greatly benefited by exploiting third world labor pools over the last several decades, but middle class American workers have increasingly found things to be very tough. Here are the statistics to prove it: • 83 percent of all U.S. stocks are in the hands of 1 percent of the people. Giant Sucking Sound The reality is that no matter how smart, how strong, how educated or how hard working American workers are, they just cannot compete with people who are desperate to put in 10 to 12 hour days at less than a dollar an hour on the other side of the world. After all, what corporation in their right mind is going to pay an American worker 10 times more (plus benefits) to do the same job? The world is fundamentally changing. Wealth and power are rapidly becoming concentrated at the top and the big global corporations are making massive amounts of money. Meanwhile, the American middle class is being systematically wiped out of existence as U.S. workers are slowly being merged into the new "global" labor pool. What do most Americans have to offer in the marketplace other than their labor? Not much. The truth is that most Americans are absolutely dependent on someone else giving them a job. But today, U.S. workers are "less attractive" than ever. Compared to the rest of the world, American workers are extremely expensive, and the government keeps passing more rules and regulations seemingly on a monthly basis that makes it even more difficult to conduct business in the United States. So corporations are moving operations out of the U.S. at breathtaking speed. Since the U.S. government does not penalize them for doing so, there really is no incentive for them to stay. What has developed is a situation where the people at the top are doing quite well, while most Americans are finding it increasingly difficult to make it. There are now about six unemployed Americans for every new job opening in the United States, and the number of "chronically unemployed" is absolutely soaring. There simply are not nearly enough jobs for everyone. Many of those who are able to get jobs are finding that they are making less money than they used to. In fact, an increasingly large percentage of Americans are working at low wage retail and service jobs. But you can't raise a family on what you make flipping burgers at McDonald's or on what you bring in from greeting customers down at the local Wal-Mart. The truth is that the middle class in America is dying -- and once it is gone it will be incredibly difficult to rebuild |
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Bill
MUSA Citizen Joined: Nov 04 2009 Status: Offline Points: 710 |
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Hard to disagree with most of that. But I'm not sure extreme protectionism is the answer either. Other countries then penalize us and our WalMart goods go from costing a quarter to a dollar, our Japanese TVs go from $600 to $2500, and on and on. I don't really have an answer for this problem but I wonder if a couple factors play into it: health care cost and the unfortunate attitude adjustment that needs to take place in our workforce. Because we don't have national healthcare, U.S. companies and American workers carry a burden of healthcare costs that many other countries don't. And we also have a work ethic problem where many people don't want to work a dirty job for $10-12/hour when their Daddy retired from the mill making $43/hour.
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Mike_Presta
MUSA Council Joined: Apr 20 2008 Location: United States Status: Offline Points: 3483 |
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Well, you all might think that I would be the first one to jump on this bandwagon, but (there's always a "but", isn't there?) in this case there are two statements that really disturb me in this article, in that they are so contradictory:
Would it not make more COMMON SENSE to begin REPEALING the rules and regulations that make it more difficult to do business here in the first place, than to enact more rules and regulations that will penalize those that TRY to do business here and find that they cannot???
THAT, in and of itself, is a DIS-incentive to try!!!
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“Mulligan said he ... doesn’t believe they necessarily make the return on investment necessary to keep funding them.” …The Middletown Journal, January 30, 2012
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