Going back to an economy where one can expect a lifelong employment after seven years of school ...

...simply ain't gonna happen. I know we all like to idealize those "good old days" where one got married at the age of sixteen
and went to work in the same steel mill as dad.

Those days are gone and they are not going back. Even if we boycott all foreign products (stupid idea and the USA would be third world within ten years if we did) this will not bring those days back.

Better to brace oneself for the inevitable future: Pump a lot of tax money into the education system. Get rid of all college tuitions.
Encourage kids to get trained in some high-tech field.

no idea what the solution is going to be but its better to be a jack of all trades than master at one it seems...

Lots of countries have them like India and China.

Without policies that protect our industries what is to stop the job drain?

Who would have ever thunk it??

That rough parity will be the reality sooner than we might think.

in blue-collar factory jobs, one income, pension, etc. Those days are indeed over, but they did exist for a time.

all had homes and sent their kids to college

with a high-school diploma, up until the 70's/80's.

It increasingly hasn't since, for a number of reasons.

Cheap-labor Republicans and neo-libs, equipped with their pie-in-the-stratosphere theories (which always fall flat on their face when a dollop of reality is applied), screwed this economy for the short AND long term. Joe Sixpack ain't re-training or inventing his way outta this mess.

Too many entrepreneurs fail or cannot even get started because this country has no universal health care, college simply costs way too damned much money, we're not replacing the outgoing career fields with anything solid and the same people that instituted this loser system are still firmly in charge of this mess.

When you were a kid and you tried to complete a task, did you try doing the same thing that failed you over and over and over and over again, hoping you'd get the result you wanted if you just kept TRYING? Well, really, maybe that logic doesn't apply here; for it assumes that the ones in charge of baking the Friedman Frosted Shitcake actually care about the needs and outcomes of the workers.

Sucky times indeed...

unless you happen to be the guy teaching it, it might be nice to have but a paycheck might be more worthwhile.

a year ago my husband's employer wiped out R&D--they were the first to go.

to this situation of joblessness. We are well on the
way of Zimbabwe if the U.S. does not do something about
trade policy.

Making the decision to have the U.S. a Service Economy
was a mistake. We must return the US to having Mfg
as 15 to 20% of GDP. '''G. Immelt, GE

We must develop an Industrial Policy for the U.S.
The Largest Country in the Developed World and no
Industrial Policy--Sherrod Brown, D. Ohio

because 70% or more are nothing more than food for the grinder of the other 30. sweep your own fucking chimney.

are the keys to the knowledge economy. The Industrial Age is dead.

This life-long learning has been the Centrist Mantra.

Yes Education is important. Education is a long term
solution. In the meantime, what do we do.

Our country is too highly populated. There can never
be enough jobs relative to our numbers of people unless
you have a variety of jobs. We have been operating on
Life long learning since the Clinton Administration.

Mfg is necessary for National Security. Buying our arms
from our adversaries is going to be real smart.

Amazing that the first thing you think of, is making guns.

But there are some other long-standing means of earning a living that do go back to "the good old days" and are (perhaps) still viable. I'm speaking of what my grandparents and generation after generation of immigrants to this country have done, and still do today: start a business. My Hungarian grandparents started a small corner grocery; my grandmother made sausage in the back to sell. My Russian/Polish grandparents started a junkyard that grew into a small auto-parts business. Both families were able to send their children to college. There are immigrants who every day open small restaurants or dry-cleaning businesses, etc. Others started by manufacturing a small thing like nails or picture hooks and grew.

I realize that this is harder to do in some areas than others. Large urban environments still allow for storefront businesses to exist. In suburbia it's more difficult. But here's what I'm thinking. In this culture in which there are no longer any small, independent pharmacies and fewer and fewer corner hardware stores, everything has been consolidated and super-sized. People shop at the big box stores, or increasingly, from the Internet. As much as we are starting as a culture to emphasize buying locally in terms of our food ... we should be trying to have a similar cultural movement that encourages us to shop and eat locally: from small businesses and restaurants that are not chains.

I'll probably be scoffed at for harboring such limited, retro notions that involve damned hard work and not as much compensation perhaps. But they do offer other benefits, such as pride of community and individual attention. All is not lost to those who have fallen through the educational cracks: my grandparents did it barely speaking the language and with 8th-grade educations.

But I just don't know how to shift people's awareness. People want things right away, and most still think that getting the best deal, price-wise, is the best way to go. But the whole manufacturing paradigm has shifted--when you buy the lowest-priced goods, you're essentially rewarding China, not the US. You're shooting yourself in the foot, unless you're in the upper echelon reaches of income brackets in the US. I hated "Buy US" rhetoric back in the 80s--I thought it was provincial and short-sighted--but now that globalization has become a reality I wonder why more people aren't selling the fact that local means better quality and better conditions for all.

Why can't we start a "Buy US" movement all over again, this time for the right reasons? For example, if I were in the market for a car, I would choose a Ford Focus over a comparable Toyota, Honda, or Hyundai unless the latter could overwhelmingly prove me wrong.

We all become bankers.

We allow all our productiuon go, and say that is the way of the world. NOT. OIt is what we, or should I say Reagan chose. And to not choose to remedy it, is to wind up with China blowing our asses off the planet. We cant make SHIT. I am a moldmaker, and they have been killing us since the seventies. If we dont start making things we can stack, we are thru.

Or China where they manufacture about 2/3 the amount of value that we do?

They are quickly seeing the utility of planned production schedules. Organizing the future works at least as well as adhoc willy nilly.

The future is called the Beijing consensus.

And it involves the globe, not Beijing.

Black eye about what? What "rules"? What data do you base this on? China imports more as % of GDP than we do, including the US as their 3rd biggest trading partner.

The same China who was imports rise 89% year over year?

Imports only make up 10% of US economy. Net imports (exports - imports) make up about 5%. Thats works out to $3000 per person.

Anyone you know who only bought $3000 worth of goods last year.

The idea that the US doesn't manufacture anything is so fucking stupid. It doesn't even stand up to 10 seconds of scrutiny.

Keep in mind they boycott the hell out of our products before you answer.

Don

especially if you're not in the right field.

Same as high school used to be.

My dad served in World War II. He retired from the Navy in 1956.

He got hired promptly by an aerospace company, and worked there for his entire career. One job.

I'm currently working my eighth "permanent", full-time job since I finished my bachelor's at UC in 1980. There were also a few in-between consulting jobs, temp jobs, and in the earlier days some under-the-table construction work and other odd jobs.

up in the third world. We will NOT end up third world for refusing to play ball in the flat earth society of "free" (slave wage) trade. We can produce and consume everything we need right here in this country and live a first world lifestyle. All that "free" trade has done is impoverish this nation and its citizens for the last 30 years.

we dump cheap agricultural goods into their economy, making their own agricultural impossible for the small farmers, so they are forced off the land and into slums of large cities..where they are totally unprepared to live..

rich westerners "move in" and buy up the vacated lands for their fancy resorts and or "business" plans..IMF/World Bank "loans" crooked leaders shit loads of money to beef up infrastructure (needed by the gringo corporate buccaneers) and when the country cannot pay it off, chaos ensues..and then we "offer" military "help"..rinse & repeat..

What we need is less emphasis on college and more on vocational training/trades.

You'll be there for a long time.

It doesn't in the 21st.

In your fantasyland, do all of us have money trees in our backyards to PAY for these multiple and unnecessary trips to college? This ain't Europe we live in.

What do you say to people who aren't meant to GO to college for whatever reason? Do you just kill them, tell them to get smarter in the next life? Leave them behind to suffer in squalor?

The problem is WAGES, not knowledge. You need a living WAGE to survive in this country. Employers aren't willing to pay that. What results is a glut of degreed workers with fewer and fewer jobs for them.

Seems that you're really big on curt pie-in-the-sky talking points peppered with unempathetic snark. You don't seem to be the least bit grounded in reality in any way.

Your diploma doesn't entitle you to anything more than the rest of us. It does not make you 'special'. It does not make you a better person. We *ALL* need jobs that pay a living wage, not just those who think their shit doesn't stink because of piece of paper.

Farming.

Seriously.

Not actuaries,
Not engineers,
Not IT
Not even frikin doctors, lawyer, or even school teachers.


I only have ONE friend my age who has had the same job for a decade.


And he polishes Flintlocks, Swords, and Armor for a living and technically works for the government.

Those days were gone a long, long time ago. Not that we should just sit back and accept it. I have been laid off 3 times and have left for pay cuts other times.

In 23 years of working, I've had 4 jobs, one of them paying minimum wage while I put myself through school (this was in the late 80s-early 90s, where college grads couldn't get shiz on a stick thanks to the Reagan/Bewsh I recession). BARELY have the one I have now, via extreme luck and bullet-dodging.

I've been through three recessions. Some on this board have been through 4 or 5. Yeah, multiple recessions after boom/bubble/CRASH economic climates, each one worse than the last . . . speaks loud VOLUMES on the success of Friedman Economics, don't it? :eyes: :eyes: :eyes: :eyes: :eyes: :eyes: :eyes: :eyes: :eyes: :eyes: :eyes: :eyes:

Dad was able to retire with better than average benefits and SS. Also, while he was working, "Layoff" to him meant "idled with SOME pay, go back to work when the economy and demand picks back up", not "kicked to the curb, frog-marched by security indignantly, good luck on your future endeavors". In real dollars, I'm not making anywhere NEAR what he made at the same age. Mom and dad also weren't part of a two-earner household . . . until Reagan's second term.

Stayed at home with them and am about to do student teaching for preschool. It won't pay me much, being a preschool teacher, but it is usually in demand and at least working with kids makes me happy. And with 4 and 5 year olds, it fits in my schedule.

I had 17 jobs that sent me W2s the first year outa highschool, I had a lot of other jobs that didn't. That was back in the late sixties. You know, before the generation that fought WW2 started dieing off and they had union jobs. Before unions became a curse word of the country.

We just passed three tax levies for our schools. There does need to be something done about jobs and trade though. The best education does no good if there are no jobs.

If you can't get lifelong work now, imagine how bad it would be with even more people with advanced degrees.


More educated people won't matter because the economic deck is already stacked against them. The supply DOESN't create it's own demand. We need to undo the damage done in the last 40 years.