OK, folks, the old-timer speaks.
I was born in 1933 (don't do the math) and represent the last generation to enjoy the middle class prosperity Thom writes about. Also the last generation for which the American Dream of upward mobility was real and achievable. Our children have not and cannot do as well as my wife and I have…
I was born in 1933 (don't do the math) and represent the last generation to enjoy the middle class prosperity Thom writes about. Also the last generation for which the American Dream of upward mobility was real and achievable. Our children have not and cannot do as well as my wife and I have managed. (Good education, hard work, a comfortable retirement. [Hell, we live like kings: our paid-for home, generous pension income, nutritious food, Medicare, no real worries.]) Our children are still working, already past the age of my retirement. Our grandchildren's futures are bleak, our great-granddaughter's future is hopeless.
The "morbidly rich" (love that term) predators who busted unions, exported manufacturing jobs, offloaded defined-benefit pension plans, etc., did far more than decimate the middle class. They sentenced the American economy to a slow death, because their actions are strangling the stupendous buying power the vibrant middle class represented. Consumer buying drives the economy, and the middle class was by far the greatest source of that.
In the early 1900's Henry Ford had a real epiphany: intuitively he recognized the importance of middle-class purchases to the survival of his company. He also recognized he wasn't paying his workers middle class wages. So, long before the United Auto Workers Union was organized, he unilaterally doubled those wages. The company flourished, and the American economy benefited, too.
Many decades later Henry's successors at Ford closed some plants in Michigan and built some in Mexico, to exploit the dirt-cheap labor there. The American autoworkers left behind lost their incomes--and hence their ability to buy cars. The Mexican workers weren't paid enought to buy cars, either.
Who was left, still earning enough to buy the cars? I was. I was by now a tenured full professor at a small university in the west: a product of the American Dream. So Ford kept selling cars to people like me--people in my generation who could easily afford them.
My generation has a life-expectancy probably in single digits. Who will buy Fords when we're gone?
The American economy is headed directly for a cliff. The buying power to support it has dwindled. The morbidly rich will prosper, transnationalizing their manufacturing corporations (and markets, notably in China), while the rest of you will live in squalor. (Not me: I will escape in the only certain way possible.)
"If something doesn't change," a wise friend once observed, "we're going to get where we're headed."
OK, folks, the old-timer speaks.
I was born in 1933 (don't do the math) and represent the last generation to enjoy the middle class prosperity Thom writes about. Also the last generation for which the American Dream of upward mobility was real and achievable. Our children have not and cannot do as well as my wife and I have managed. (Good education, hard work, a comfortable retirement. [Hell, we live like kings: our paid-for home, generous pension income, nutritious food, Medicare, no real worries.]) Our children are still working, already past the age of my retirement. Our grandchildren's futures are bleak, our great-granddaughter's future is hopeless.
The "morbidly rich" (love that term) predators who busted unions, exported manufacturing jobs, offloaded defined-benefit pension plans, etc., did far more than decimate the middle class. They sentenced the American economy to a slow death, because their actions are strangling the stupendous buying power the vibrant middle class represented. Consumer buying drives the economy, and the middle class was by far the greatest source of that.
In the early 1900's Henry Ford had a real epiphany: intuitively he recognized the importance of middle-class purchases to the survival of his company. He also recognized he wasn't paying his workers middle class wages. So, long before the United Auto Workers Union was organized, he unilaterally doubled those wages. The company flourished, and the American economy benefited, too.
Many decades later Henry's successors at Ford closed some plants in Michigan and built some in Mexico, to exploit the dirt-cheap labor there. The American autoworkers left behind lost their incomes--and hence their ability to buy cars. The Mexican workers weren't paid enought to buy cars, either.
Who was left, still earning enough to buy the cars? I was. I was by now a tenured full professor at a small university in the west: a product of the American Dream. So Ford kept selling cars to people like me--people in my generation who could easily afford them.
My generation has a life-expectancy probably in single digits. Who will buy Fords when we're gone?
The American economy is headed directly for a cliff. The buying power to support it has dwindled. The morbidly rich will prosper, transnationalizing their manufacturing corporations (and markets, notably in China), while the rest of you will live in squalor. (Not me: I will escape in the only certain way possible.)
"If something doesn't change," a wise friend once observed, "we're going to get where we're headed."
That looks to me like the Hunger Games scenario.
Thanks once again, Thom, for another heads-up.
Make something change, folks.