Mortgage the future

This article really sums up just how bad off this country is now. We've spend 30 years shitting on our own economy and underfunding our education system. The days that you could work in a factory and make a middle class income are gone. Not only are those days gone but that is exactly what got us into this disaster we're in now.

The employment costs of Union dominated manufacturing skyrocketed, this forced the companies to invest in streamlining every other element of their production process in order to keep prices low and compete in a global market. So once the government lessened restrictions via NAFTA the companies realized their largest expense was their employment costs. Since they couldn't reduce their costs anywhere else out went the jobs. So the Unions in this country have been slowly strangling themselves for decades and they have finally taken the rest of us with them.

Now you've got foreign companies buying up the cheap broken pieces and paying much lower wages. Guess what, if your only skill is assembling refrigerators you now have to compete against an international community of refrigerator assemblers. Whomever can do it the fastest and the cheapest wins; and these days that person is not an American worker. Add to that the ballooning price of health care in this country and the problem looks even worse. Why would any company want to bring manufacturing jobs into this country? This is the only time that a sinking dollar will work for us because that means international companies get a virtual "discount" on paying US employees while the dollar is so low. If you had any hopes that our currency will rebound you should reconsider, it may end up being good for our economy.

The sad thing is that you used to have a chance at a good education. With the hopes that with an education you stood a chance of getting a "better" job outside of the manufacturing realm. But since we've basically let our entire education system either decay or disappear that's nearly impossible.