Average pay for college grads has gone down 10% from 10 years ago! And guess what? College costs have almost doubled. No wonder people are questioning the value of a college education.
Why has pay gone down? Global competition. It has really hurt american workers. We now complete with countries where wages and cost of living is much, much lower. With outsourcing and immigration, companies can hire workers for much less and this keeps a lid on wage increases for all workers in the US.
Companies complain they can’t find qualified workers in this country and need to import them. But the reality is that they want the cheaper labor to maximize profits. And it has worked extrememly well. You might say that in order to get the benefit of the increased profits, people should invest in the companies’ stock but the market is driven by much more than profits. Heavy speculation has made the stock market and other investments extremely volitle and people are afraid to invest. What should have taken place is that workers should be in profit sharing plans. That would vastly improve workers standard of living and let them benefit from the increase in productivity they contribute towards.
What is so troubling is that the Republicans think the answer is to keep lowering our standard of living, wages and working conditions to those of China and India. They want fewer regulations, lower minimum wages. They think this is the answer when it is just the opposite. What is even more confusing is the number of workers that support this approach. They have to be in the shallow end of the Gene pool because they support leaders and polices that would do them the most harm.
So one solution again is to push for profit sharing plans so the gains do not just go to the senior management of companies.
Why doesn’t Obama and the democrats clearly articulate the problems with the economy and inequality? The idea of the 1% etc is not that it is the cause of the problem but one of the symptoms. The American Dream is really two things. One is the ability to become really rich by ones own hard work without having to have been born rich. America is still a great place to do that. But the second part is being able to get a good paying job that will allow one to live in comfort, with two cars and house and a boat and have their kids get a good education. THAT part of the dream has been severely damaged over the last 30 years. WHY? What caused this?
One is Reagan voodoo economics and the failed theories of Chicago econmists. This was the idea of limiting governement’s role in the economy and regulating financial markets and cutting taxes everywhere. The second was global competition. The third is the decline in labor unions.
There is no debate about the declining middle class and its massive debt to try and preserve its standards of living. What is debated is the causes. The conservatives want us to believe that more of the last 30 years of policy taken to another level of extremism will fix the problems. That is like doing the same thing over and over and getting the same results. Insanity.
The few liberals around believe that we need the governement to go back to using taxes to allocate resources back to the public and thus helping the middleclass grow again. We need government policies to combat global competition or else we will continue to lower the standard of living to that of INdia and China. And we need unions to wake up and start adapting to the new world. There should be a union representing all of IT workers.