The past couple of months have been busy enough that I haven't had time to post. Today I just want to post a handful of headlines from the NY Times from these busy days to give an overview of how the paper of record is documenting America's slide toward a more stratified, third-world-esque society.
"Low-Wage Workers Are Finding Poverty Harder to Escape"
"50 Years Into the War on Poverty, Hardship Hits Back"
"The American Middle Class Is No Longer the World’s Richest"
"Recovery Has Created Far More Low-Wage Jobs Than Better-Paid Ones"
When you combine these stories with a few other Times columns from last year, a very clear picture emerges. People are having to work harder to keep up because jobs don't pay what they used to. If you're lucky enough to find work, you're not likely to make as much as someone just like you did 25 or 30 years ago, and there's a much better chance these days that you're living in poverty and relying on things like food stamps, heating assistance, or charity to meet all of your needs. The impact of this has been felt society-wide, as more and more people begin giving up looking for work where it doesn't exist and turning to disability, social security payments, or black market dealings like drugs.
Intuitively this makes sense, as it's not possible for all of us to get rich flipping houses (or make ends meet flipping burgers). Those parts of the economy that could be shipped overseas for cheaper wages have largely already left. Much of what remains here is being shifted to part-time work, contract work (without benefits), and temporary employment. When our largest exports are natural resources and our largest imports are everything "Made in China," it doesn't take much imagination to understand that the result of all our bottom-dollar shopping has been bottom-dollar jobs for those of us who can find them.
Those of us who can't are creating a large and growing underclass, typical of every empire in its stages of decline. It looks like the 20-something college grad living with his parents, who decided not to take a job because the wages were too low to justify moving out of mom's basement. Or perhaps those 12 million people who've dropped out of the labor force in the last seven years, dropping the number of people in the workforce to levels last seen in the early 1980s.
