woodchip wrote:What made this nation are the electricians, pipe fitters, carpenters, painters and all the other skilled trades. You can have all the money in the world Slick but if no one is there to build your house, build the road you drive on or farm the land to feed you,,,,what would you have? Wealth might of funded Christopher Columbus's trip to America, but it was average people with a dream that built it. Most all of whom had no formal education.
but, they generally did so, scrimping and sacrificing for the generations of their families to follow. That is one key thing out the window. How many poor immigrants scraped by precisely to send their kids to college? And, the nation was better for it. Hell, there will always be manual laborers....always. People need to make money to survive, and without higher levels of education, that is the only option. What makes you think those people are not still here? The problem, as I see it, is that far too many people with limited skills, limited income and limited education have lived their lives focused on shallow, material things, to the detriment of their descendants. And that, not liberalism, nor religion, nor conservatism, is the root of the mess we are currently in.
It goes like this: Mr and Mrs Middleclass make, say, $80,000 per year. Yet, despite these facts, they EXPECT to send little Susy and Johnny off to school with around 15 new sets of clothes each year. Hence, you get the WalMarts of the world, selling them Pakistani clothing at cheap prices. Goodbye, US clothing industry. They expect to own a couple of $35,000 cars. Goodbye, college savings. Same for cheap electronic gadgets(Hell, we didn't own a color TV until I was 10 years old, and my dad could have bought a damn TV factory.....hmmmm, ever wonder why some families advance economically?). Finally, these folks expect they need a 2800 square foot home, at some inflated price, but don't have the money to pay the rational 20% downpayment. Bingo! You have a really risky mortgage, and a soon-to-bite-us price bubble.
On the other end of such unrealistic expectations are the greedy and unscrupulous, all too willing to make a quick, large chunk of money off of these millions of fools.
How does this relate to politics? Easy, certain politicians on the national scale(ex. Reagan) played up the unrealistic expectations and tried to make the road easier for the greedy. Others(ex. Clinton) made the road for the greedy even easier, and lowered the barriers to unfair trade(here is an area in which I would gladly back Sgt T's call for tariffs) balances, screwing the economy damned near permanently for the working class. And, along the way, why didn't the patrician class step in to right the wrongs, as they did in the early to mid 20th century? Mainly, I suspect, for two reasons. They had the money to invest and get even wealthier due to these practices, coupled with a level of disgust and disdain for the unrealistic expectations of the very folks who desperately needed their intervention, but were too self-centered to see it. Hence, we arrive at 2011, with an economy that likely will never recover employment levels of the past, ever more dependent on other natons, and likely, headed for some sort of major social upheaval as a result. Not exactly the USA I would like to see, nor the one my forefathers worked to build, but it is what it is.
Meanwhile, the rightwing types will blame liberals, or the loss of Christian virtues. The left will blame the 'corporations'(go to any truly left-wing site and you know what I mean here), and the downward spiral continues and accelerates.
"The Party told you to reject all evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command."
George Orwell---"1984"
