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Posted by D Sherman [72.47.9.228] on Monday, December 12, 2011 at 23:59:50 :
In Reply to: Re: when will it end? posted by Franz [209.86.226.27] on Monday, December 12, 2011 at 22:55:36 :
There's some truth to that. This is a great age to be on the dole. There's a dole for just about anybody these days if you can suck in your pride and apply for it. Of course everybody thinks they "earned" their particular dole and they get fighting mad if you insinuate otherwise. The doles are why we can have 25% real unemployment and yet the mall parking lots are full of new cars and people whine about how much their cable TV costs.
China is definitely part of the equation, though, especially in terms of factory jobs. On the other hand look at what stuff like TVs, power tools, and clothes cost, relative to wages, back in the 1960s and we'd never want to go back to living like people did back then, having to work so much to get so little. Of course they didn't know how bad they had it.
A lot of people will disagree with me on this, but the first cause of the decline of American manufacturing was foreign competition. It was the deadly combination of new environmental laws and arrogant unions. The environmental laws pushed the plants to the brink, and then when the unions said "gives us what we want or we'll shut you down", the owners said, "Don't bother. I just shut the plant down". The US steel industry died back when everyone in China was still wearing Mao suits and eating grass soup. Automobiles got hit on both ends by environmental laws too -- they had to redesign everything to meet the regulations, and at the same time much of the manufacturing got way more expensive. Chrome bumpers and trim didn't go out of style. Plating just got too expensive to do.
I'm not saying we should compete with the third world in polluting our country for the sake of jobs, but we've gone too far when new regulations triple the price of electricity from hydroelectric plants that were built and paid for 50 years ago, gasoline formulas are regulated on a state-by-state and sometimes month-by-month basis, and mining on anything but the very largest scale funded by the biggest corporations is basically impossible.
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