I blame Apple, Walmart and cable television for our society's problems.
Sounds silly, but there is validity to the statement
Sounds silly, but there is validity to the statement
If you make a lot of money, you can choose a 500 dollar I-phone over a 50 dollar flip phone.
But sometimes it's not an IQ thing, it's a choice between wearing fruit of looms or wal-mart shopping bags.
these days everything is made in China or Taiwan anyway, so it's not a real choice either way.
You can't blame businesses for simply following the free market that wants quality, cheap products. you have to blame the government whose job it is to regulate that market that those companies have to survive in.
Quite honestly, you're too young to know the difference between a working middle class and the working poor.
You assume too much, and you don't know how old i am. There is a lot of poverty in my familial as well as personal background. Lots of beans, rice and potatoes. Couldn't afford new shoes so my siblings ended up with deformed feet. you replaced them when the buttoms fell out. My mother and father worked minimum wage in the 90s and early 2000s and supported 3 kids and our disabled grandmother. my paternal grandparents were subsistence farmers in the '50s and '60s in Georgia, my maternal side were farmers in Ohio...
i was always fed and taken care of, but it's not like i don't know what working poor is. of course there are always folks who are worse off than me.
what's really sad about this statement, in my opinion anyway, is that i've worked minimum wage jobs and seen my co-workers live in their automobiles or have two full-time jobs. I've seen my co workers use food stamps and WIC. the personal poverty i experienced as a child put aside, i experience and am more familiar with poverty than a great many people twice or three times my age.
Some guy who grew up in a wealthy family and had their lives and college paid for (Trump, haha.) know less about poverty than i. and yet you assume my experience based on my perceived age. I think that's a mistake.
Also, you turned a discussion about the reality of minimum wage onto a personal attack against me, my age and experience, which i believe is a mistake.
Just using this post to make a point.
That skill needed by a company once upon a time was usually a trade. Machinist, carpenter, electrician, etc. IOW, we used to be about actually making some sort of durable item that people and industry wanted and needed to buy. Now it's all about retail, food service or writing an app for entertainment. That seems to be the extent of the this "new" economy that they are supposedly teaching college students to make a living in.
I think people underestimate the reality of modern manufacturing and construction as well. Far less people are required for tasks. Less managers, less employees. Office-work especially was decimated by the introduction of computer technology. Manufacturing has been cut by more than half by automated robots and so on.
even service jobs like Mcdonalds no longer require as many employees as they once did.
The reality is that sooner or later, we're going to end up supporting a lot of folks on welfare and taxation. Some of the jobs, the good-paying ones especially, are not going to be here forever.
eventually, it's not going to be enough to work hard or have a good skill. you'll just be obsolete. Just like the Horse.
Someone has to manufacture all those new robots. Just sayin.
Do you know what destroyed over 60,000 manufacturing companies in the US the last 25 years? Not jobs, entire companies.
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The other side of that coin is that someone has to design, maintain and operate the automation.
Robots can manufacture robots, and it takes significantly less people to do that then it takes to non-robotically manufacture a car.
I would imagine overshoring had something to do with that as well.
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