jobs. She works at a pizza joint making the crusts for a little more than minimum wage and not bennies. He husband works for a bit more but it is still low income and he has some bennies. I live with them so we have three incomes and still end up eligible for food stamps, energy assistance.

What she does not see is that no one is making what her parents made when they were raising their children and the cost of living has risen drastically since then.

She is fighting against her own family!!

I wondered aloud how on Earth I'd ever be able to support a comparable standard of living back home working at jobs that pay $9/hour. But apparently, that is a standard wage now in the Midwest. Yet, I look around and see lots of new cars and spacious suburban homes, and all I can do is scratch my head how people are making ends meet. I certainly couldn't do it, not on a $9/hour job.

The other point I want to make is that for our parents' generation, I think generally it was taught that you shouldn't tell your children what you make, because my folks NEVER ever told any of us what they made. Thus, this are given poor guidance from TV shows or films as to what kind of money or standard of living they'll be able to afford.

Not everyone wants to deal with random people everyday and they might like routines as well. There are people who like working behind the scenes as a basic demand, and trying to push our economy into a retail system will alienate them from it.

A DUer described an acquaintance whom he was trying to help find a job: "He ain't that handsome and he ain't that charming." Can you imagine that person trying to get hired for most service jobs? Yet 30 years ago, he probably could have gotten a decent factory job and had a decent life.

The brain drain in this country isn't just to other countries. The apple is rotting at the core. I believe our obsession with generating unthinking, obedient middle managers who are skilled, but not too skilled is ruining this country.

Why do we do this? Mostly out of greed. We don't want to train workers anymore, and would rather just outsource away. We're also getting more like China in the sense that inferiority of one's product is seen as a good thing as long as it saves money.

-Laelth

Go back through history, and all our advances in automation and mechanization have replaced more labor than they created. Inventing the Combine Harvester took a lot more labor out of the fields than was ever required to build and service them.

At that time, the labor moved to the cities and met unfilled demand for labor, increasing overall output. So it wasn't really a problem.

But we are past that now. We no longer have large unfilled demand for labor in our cities. As a result, further mechanization and automation are going to cause problems.

What we need to is capitalize on our massive increases in productivity over the last few decades. We don't need to work 40 hours a week because we get a hell of a lot more done in each hour than our great grandparents. That's a big part of why there's so many part-time jobs out there now - we just don't need as much labor.

We need a 32-hour-work-week to be normal with the same pay ($10/hr becomes $12.50). That increase in leisure time will increase demand for labor as well as create jobs filling that leisure time.

The new economy is about virtually no employee businesses. It may be oxymoronic but that is what MBA's treasure pure profit and NO liabilities like employees. This trend was put on steroids with Reagan. And it has continued for 30 years.

There may be a lot of jobs but very few have Any security long term now. You are more likely to spend a lot of time being unemployed now. And older workers are in danger of being unemployable by 50 now.

Doesn't make it impossible.

But we're going to have to reduce labor hours to deal with automation, or the result will be the violent overthrow of those MBAs. Large groups of people do not peacefully starve to death.

Why would it be paid more for less time on the job that it's not needed to do?

that the economy collapses in a violent revolution.

And there's still jobs for labor to do. The difference is we appear to be able to satisfy the demand for labor. That's not something we've been able to do before.

As a result, we either have people starving and then "doing something" about that starving, or we have everyone cut back so everyone has jobs. Then to keep the economy rolling, you need those jobs to pay more per hour.

This isn't something that would "naturally" appear in the labor market. Just like the 40-hour work week is not natural.