BillBob - I know, that's what I meant.
Sadly funny, "the world needs ditch diggers" is true, but our economy needs a swath of people representing the entire spectrum of the job market from the bottom to the top, and we need the jobs that support them. So a few years back Wall Street ups the stock of a company for cutting costs by laying off a few thousand here and a few there, and then other companies follow suit. (Yeh, I'm picking unrelated situations here)... But now some of those workers are working again, sometimes in the same field and sometimes in new careers, often at a lower pay and position than before as there is somewhat of a glut, yet they no longer count against the unemployment becuase the 80K job has been replaced with a 50K job. And the 50 with a 30 yada,yada,yada...
People are getting retrained at the governments expense (read ours) to learn new skills, ie computers, or various corners of the service industry because their job was moved overseas.
In my field of IT, the loss of jobs to the dot.com boom (partially the fault of STOOOPID investers not knowing what WTF they were doing), the offshoring of positions (plenty of interesting articles saying how well that is working
) and I was competing for positions with my certs, skills, and 9 years on the job against someone with a masters and 15 years that may be severly overqualified but that's where the market was. Now I'm not buying a lot of stuff too. (Anyone looking for a network geek?)
So we have this wasting away of our industry and manufacturing base as the jobs go overseas. That person that spun metal is now landscaping or painting if they are lucky or Walmarting if they are not. The buying power remaining requires thay shop at Walmart further fueling the cycle. Wall Street raves about WM's success.
Housing costs in New England as well as other areas have skyrocketed. I moved to RI a few years ago but could never move back to mass now if I wanted. In the Boston area, pretty much between Providence and Nashua NH you need to spend 450-500K and up for a decent 3-4br in the average comunities. How much does Joe and Sally just got married need to have in combined income to turn that kind of nut? 120K household income? More? And Joe CEO has managed a company half into the ground but gets a big dollar bonus?
We have big effing problems in this great country.
Our schools suck for the most part.
We can't graduate ONE THIRD of our kids even though 20-30 percent of those that do probably should not in the first place.
The parents that should be reading to their kids when young are pulling three jobs to keep above water.
We're buying so much imported product that our dollars are all overseas, mostly in Asia.
The dollar is devauling. Sure, now our products are more attractive but what do we have left to trade with? Boeings? Sure, China will take some Boeings from us. The first 10 and then they start license production... Oil is going theu the roof from demand overseas and to the weak dollar.
Corporations are setting up shop in the Carribean so to evade taxes and pumping more money, then offshoring the jobs to save more money.
We are losing our technical edge.
We have lost our manufacturing edge.
How many service jobs will there be replace the industrial economy that we had?
China keeps ignoring patents and builds or rev-engineers when they want. They are building SIGNIFICANT military forces in their neck of the woods that while we may more and better, our stuff is not all in there neck of the woods. They control the access to the Panama Canal
We were the cat's nuts before. We are losing it people.