HowUS Best&Brightest Destroyed US Working Class

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2022/01/the-china-shock-of-t…

First, the US embraced NAFTA, with the Clinton Administration falsely claiming it would create jobs when the Samuelson-Stolper theorem made clear it wouldn’t. And by the time China WTO entry would be under consideration, the impact on manufacturing employment would be incontrovertible.

https://theconversation.com/the-china-shock-of-trade-in-the-…
How China gained so much so quickly

As a part of its increased openness to the world, China joined the World Trade Organization – the international body that sets global trade rules – in 2001. Believing that increasing economic liberalization would lead to political liberalization in China, the U.S. began to engage in robust trade with the country.

International trade theory teaches that free trade between nations makes them better off than not trading at all. And recent research underscores that the economic gains to the U.S. from trade in general have been positive but small, adding about 2% to 8% of gross domestic product.

Yet trade with China has given rise to a significant economic shock involving job losses and declines in human welfare in several U.S. regions, especially in the Deep South and in some Midwestern states.

The U.S. economy lost 1.5 million manufacturing jobs between 1980 and 2000, and 5 million more between 2000 and 2017.

This fall in manufacturing employment was not accompanied with the same number of job gains in other sectors of the U.S. economy.

A decade after the conclusion of the China trade shock in 2010, the U.S. still has a large number of local economies in which studies show social structures, including the institution of marriage, are fraying because workers have lost their jobs and don’t have stable salaries they can live on.

This lack of wages has subsequently resulted in declines in the demand for local goods and services and in housing values and property tax revenues. There has also been an increase in the number of people on government assistance such as Medicaid.

left-behind places never completely die. Instead, in such places fewer people marry and have children. More children live in poverty, alcohol and drug abuse go up and young men are less likely to graduate from college.

Therefore, a rethinking of economic policy is likely now needed in the U.S. to focus on two key points: the need to provide adequate assistance to workers in mass layoff events and to recognize that this assistance, quite frequently, will need to be place-based.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/26/us/politics/job-corps-tra…
“Job Corps doesn’t work,” said Teresa Sanders, a former teacher at the North Texas center who quit in frustration in 2015 after a rash of violent episodes inside the center, but who keeps in touch with dozens of former students through a Facebook page. “The adults are making money, the politicians are getting photo ops. But we are all failing the students.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/01/why-is…
WHY IS THE U.S. SO BAD AT WORKER RETRAINING?
One, those who need the training typically don’t know about—or are excluded from—them. Two, course material tends to be disjointed from the needs of employers. Three, and perhaps most importantly, job-training programs don’t force employers to pay skilled people decent wages. It’s worth taking a closer look at why programs like this go awry.

https://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/economy-budget/323885…
So far, federal job-training programs have been outright failures

Last Nov. 8, while millions of Americans flocked to the polls, the U.S. Labor Department slyly released an embarrassing report. The “Workforce Investment Act (WIA) Gold Standard Evaluation,” completed six months earlier, concluded that all of the federal government’s primary job-training programs don’t really work.

Specifically, the study found that the programs are largely ineffective at raising participant’s earnings and are offering services that don’t meet the needs of job seekers or employers.

Simply put, the Department of Labor’s job-training services are largely a waste of time for the majority of job seekers and an enormous squandering of taxpayer dollars.

The US working class has been sold down the river with no aid from government entities while corporations profits surged as does the stock market which is largely owned by the top 10%. Anyone think there could be political consequences to government failed long term thinking. Remember 2016 presidential election? A return to business as usual in 2020 isn’t likely to address working class dismal economic situation. The working class is outside the building looking through the windows viewing how their betters exist & live. Being told from one side to go to high priced university & from the other side to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Meanwhile our nation’s government is bipartisan ally worried about the Russia & China “existential threat” while continuing to ignore the working class. Perhaps the “goobers” will take a lesson from Kazakhstan and begin violent protests as the ballot box solution has not worked for them?

Interesting times we live in. Well time to make some popcorn & watch the farce continue.

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China took many manufacturing jobs. No surprise there, as offshoring was quite popular in the 1990’s. Just look at your recent purchases for the Made In China stamp. How many items are Made In Mexico? Mostly cars and tomatoes, and NAFTA mostly hurt US auto unions. The overall US economy benefited from all of this trade, but it was mostly the JC class and billionaires who collected the gold. The JC were then given many tax cuts so they could keep more of the gold.

NAFTA was implemented in 1994.
US Manufacturing jobs (MANEMP) were flat from 1994 to 2001.
China joined the WTO in 2001.
From 2001 to 2010, MANEMP dropped by 5 million.
MANEMP has been trending up since 2010.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MANEMP

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The US working class has been sold down the river with no aid from government entities while corporations profits surged as does the stock market which is largely owned by the top 10%.

Sure. But they did it to themselves.

Working-class folks who were delighted with Ronald Reagan getting tough with “welfare queens” and “big, black bucks on food stamps” weren’t paying attention when he cut taxes for the rich and jacked up FICA taxes on the working class.

Lyndon Johnson explained it best.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/lbj-convince-the-lowest-wh…
“If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”

We also see this in the wisdom of Dean Wormer from the classic movie Animal House

“Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkoPq5AOCOA

intercst

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US corporations moved factory operations to China. Rather than China’s corporations made inroads here.

The problem in the US is fiscal policy of low taxes and high deficits v high taxes on the wealthy and fiscal policy spurring on high GDP growth rates.

We need to stop feeding the entire economy over to the top 2%. It makes no sense at all.

Those 2% never even say thank. Instead we get ever cheaper meat at MCD.

Ross Perot warned us about the “great sucking sounds of jobs lost to China” and he was right. You won’t find many things not made in China.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_sucking_sound

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intercst:“Working-class folks who were delighted with Ronald Reagan getting tough with “welfare queens” and “big, black bucks on food stamps” weren’t paying attention when he cut taxes for the rich and jacked up FICA taxes on the working class.”

The FICA taxes were out of touch with reality. Of course, all of Congress decided to pass the increase in taxes to fund the retirement and health care of 100 million future retirees. And a new fix is needed again as before you know it, both programs will have exhausted their ‘reserves’ and be a giant drain on GDP. Medicare/Medicaid is already there.

As to Reagan, he triggered one of the giant expansions in the economy. Fantastic for workers with tens of millions of jobs created, entire new industries created (the cellular system market), the computer revolution (PC and software) leading to the internet and connected world. Wasn’t long after the iPhone.

Yeah, those that didn’t save and own stock didn’t see the rise in their savings, but 401Ks started mid 80s. Common working folks certainly were in the tax deferred markets.

Yeah, the ‘wealthy’ always own a chunk. Weather it is plantations (1700s, 1800s) or entire industries like railroads and oil and sugar cane and cotton to grains of all sorts, to grist mills, cereals, steel, aluminum, salt, mining, etc. That’s not to say that millions also did well owning small businesses and lived a decent life - from grocery store owners, bar owners, restaurants, plumbers, sewer techs, carpenters, builders, auto workers, etc.

Most waitresses and store clerks aren’t going to get rich. takes 3 weeks or less to train a new one. It’s job skills that determine how much you’ll get. Takes a while to learn to be an electrician or HVAC tech, but you get that effort back many times over. SO it goes.

Heck, a smart teen - can wind up with a $150,000+ software job these days. Or a not so smart teen can wind up for 20 years at Whataburger flipping burgers.

t.

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Ross Perot warned us about the “great sucking sounds of jobs lost to China”…

It was 1992 about NAFTA and Mexico. But, same general idea.

DB2

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We also see this in the wisdom of Dean Wormer from the classic movie Animal House

“Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkoPq5AOCOA

intercst

I paid more attention to Dean Wormer’s wife…please don’t put me on double secret

probation…it’s to cold for a road trip…

>> Working-class folks who were delighted with Ronald Reagan getting tough with “welfare queens” and “big, black bucks on food stamps” weren’t paying attention when he cut taxes for the rich and jacked up FICA taxes on the working class. <<

>> As to Reagan, he triggered one of the giant expansions in the economy. Fantastic for workers with tens of millions of jobs created, entire new industries created (the cellular system market), the computer revolution (PC and software) leading to the internet and connected world. Wasn’t long after the iPhone. <<

Not really. A graph of Moore’s law shows nothing special happened in the 1980’s. Moore’s law was posited in 1965. The precursor to the internet (arpanet) also started in the 1960’s. A graph of real US GDP also shows nothing special happened in the 1980’s. Just a continuation of the trend. Reagan’s real legacy is the increase in the Federal Debt from 30% to 60% of GDP. The Human Genome Project was initiated in 1990, and so Bush can get some credit for that.

----- links -----
Moore’s law
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law#/media/File:Moor…

Real Gross Domestic Product
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=KEXy

Federal Debt: Total Public Debt as Percent of Gross Domestic Product
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/gfdegdq188S

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Working-class folks who were delighted with Ronald Reagan getting tough with “welfare queens” and “big, black bucks on food stamps” weren’t paying attention when he cut taxes for the rich and jacked up FICA taxes on the working class.

It was Bill Clinton that enacted NAFTA that started the rush of moving factories to cheaper labor environs.
I recommend you read noted author Thomas Frank’s piece:“Bill Clinton’s odious presidency: Thomas Frank on the real history of the '90s
Welfare reform. NAFTA. The crime bill. Prisons. Aides wondered if Bill knew who he was. His legacy is sadly clear”
https://www.salon.com/2016/03/14/bill_clintons_odious_presid…
It was that administration that helped set the stage for 2008. The repeal of Glass-Seagull Act. Allowing Robert Rubin, Alan Greenspan & Larry Summers to mute her (Brooksley Born) concerns & prevent regulating the derivatives markets. They ran her out of Washington as she resigned. Shortly after the Long Term Capital Management crisis occurred. The derivatives market continued to grow. Then in 2008, the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers forced a broad recognition of a financial crisis in both the US and world capital markets.
PBS Frontline "The Warning, A documentary “Inside job” & Hollywood film “The Big Short” all cover the events in 2008 & what led up to the 2008 melt down.

Thomas Frank was once the darling of liberal democrats when he wrote “What’s the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America”.
Subsequent writings has caused indigestion amongst those who place Frank on a pedestal as he informed that the democrat party is no longer the party of the worker but made of the professional class in his “Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?”
Frank points out that the Democrats have done little to advance traditional liberal goals: expanding opportunity, fighting for social justice, and ensuring that workers get a fair deal. Indeed, they have scarcely dented the free-market consensus at all. This is not for lack of opportunity: Democrats have occupied the White House for sixteen of the last twenty-four years, and yet the decline of the middle class has only accelerated. Wall Street gets its bailouts, wages keep falling, and the free-trade deals keep coming.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B012N992EK/ref=dbs_a_def_r…

And his most recent:“The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism”
Frank reminds us how much we owe to the populist ethos. Frank also shows that elitist groups have reliably detested populism, lashing out at working-class concerns. The anti-populist vituperations by the Washington centrists of today are only the latest expression.

Frank pummels the elites, revisits the movement’s provocative politics, and declares true populism to be the language of promise and optimism. The People, No is a ringing affirmation of a movement that, Frank shows us, is not the problem of our times, but the solution for what ails us.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07R8PCLWL/ref=dbs_a_def_r…

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"A graph of Moore’s law shows nothing special happened in the 1980’s. Moore’s law was posited in 1965. The precursor to the internet (arpanet) also started in the 1960’s. "

The creation of the PC (IBM in 1981) started an entire revolution in the 1980s.

What would the ‘internet’ be without users by the billions having access? A big nothing confined to academia and mainframes and mini computers that cost tens of thousands each.

The internet also didn’t go anywhere until fiber optic communications arrived in the early 1980s with the pioneering MCI Mafos system. AT&T was plodding along with multi-mode short range stuff. The invention of single mode fiber (by Siecor) made decent interconnect speeds possible other than Ma Bells T-1 lines (1.5 mbits/sec). Now, computers could be hooked together with gigabyte capacities.

You simply glossed over cellular. The first prototype systems went in (one by Motorola and one by AT&T using $4000 mobiles and no portables. The FCC in about 1984 issued the first 60 licenses (2 per city - one for MA Bell company, one for a competitor) in the first 30 cities. Then quickly added the next tier of 30 and another tier of 30. Took a few years till things took off, bag phones arrived and then ‘handsets’ still costing thousands each. Cellular changed the industries across the board. also the demise of ‘paging’ and other ‘radio carriers’ providing interconnect.

As for Moore’s law, it was intimately involved in the design of PC components - going from 8 and 16 bit processors to 32 then 64 bit processors, megs of memory, and new functions.

The 1980s saw the rise of ‘email’. Led by a few companies (Prodigy, MCI Mail, etc) starting out, the AOL and others - there’s trillions of email messages sent a day.

Reagan also reduced the 15%/yr inflation (max) that had been going on for years - with mortgage rates of 8 and 9% common…

If you don’t think cellular was important, like 4 billion cellular users disagree with you. Folks , esp teens, can’t live without checking their phone every 10 minutes. Now the phone does ‘internet’ and no one thinks twice about it.

All that was due to a good ‘business’ environment that triggered 30-40 million jobs of today. Probably 500 million world wide.

t

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telegraph
"A graph of Moore’s law shows nothing special happened in the 1980’s. Moore’s law was posited in 1965. The precursor to the internet (Arpanet) also started in the 1960’s. "

The creation of the PC (IBM in 1981) started an entire revolution in the 1980’s

IBM created the PC? Disagree completely. To wit:

Today, the machines are referred to, and differentiated as, “Apples” (=Apple Computer) or “PC’s” (=All other machines, including IBM et al ‘back then’), but the core “PC” technology was the Steve Jobs/Steve Wozniak creation in the late 70’s. THEY created the “PC”. (i.e. A small machine for the home or small office.)

(Notably: IBM, even with a very useful if somewhat expensive attempt, was quite early chased from the field, as Big Blue failed to adapt their “PC” division’s model to what was needed to compete in the completely new economics [and foreign to them] structure required.)

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tjscott0 writes,

<<Working-class folks who were delighted with Ronald Reagan getting tough with “welfare queens” and “big, black bucks on food stamps” weren’t paying attention when he cut taxes for the rich and jacked up FICA taxes on the working class.>>

It was Bill Clinton that enacted NAFTA that started the rush of moving factories to cheaper labor environs.

I agree with you on the Clintons. I voted for Ross Perot twice.

intercst

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1916???

Make that 1912!!!

The math gets so tough as one ages!!!

Arghhh

Poor “BJ Billie”, he was SO misunderstood!

In 1992, after defeating a WWII hero opponent, elected even with his own record of demonstrating, IN MOSCOW, against the US Vietnam war, and then, when elected, benefiting from the Speaker Gingrich “Contract WITH America” legislation, (re-phrased as ON America, by the libtards), and then sitting while the economy productivity burgeoned in the 90’s as PC’s showed up on office desks everywhere, on and on and on… Good ol’ BJ. What a fine fellow. What a fine SPOUSE!!!

(Has anyone EVER answered the question: "It depends on what the meaning of “IS” is?)

(Ross’ vote-splitting single handedly gave BJ the election, like it or not. Same as the vote splitting of Taft, Teddy R. and W. Wilson in 1916. Close parallels.

Interesting juxtaposition: If Taft had been reelected in 1916, tossing (openly racist, by the by) W. Wilson aside, WWI raging, would Russia have gone to Marxism with their murdering Bolsheviks??? Too many variables to discuss in an on line chat room!)

I bet you are a delight at parties.

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I was at IBM when the IBM PC was released using the Charlie Chaplin Modern Times ads, and worked on the DynaTAC cell phone at Motorola, and so am familiar with that history. Both of these products relied on transistor density, with the DynaTAC using several custom hybrid chips. I don’t remember any direct US federal government involvement in these projects, as it was not needed for the development work. These products would have come out about the same time no matter who happened to be in the White House. Saying it was because of a “good business environment” makes no sense to me, and I was at IBM and Motorola when these products launched.

On April 3, 1973, Motorola engineer Martin Cooper made the first-ever cell phone call on the DynaTAC 8000X.
The first commercial automated cellular network (1G) analog was launched in Japan by Nippon Telegraph and Telephone in 1979.
The 1977 trinity (Commodore PET 2001, Apple II, TRS-80) launched the personal computer boom.

If you want to get into politics, there were some US federal government decisions that affected the technology roadmap (for example, Eisenhower’s student loan program started in response to Sputnik). But METAR is probably not the place for such a discussion.

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