Why Is There So Much Surprise Concerning Unemployment Levels When So Many Good Jobs Have Been Outsourced?
Question by Alan H: Why is there so much surprise concerning unemployment levels when so many good jobs have been outsourced?
In the 1990s and 2000s Democrat (Clintonian) and Republican (Bushian) policies encouraged companies to outsource their production with ensuing job losses in America. This process effectively gutted America’s bread and butter sources of labor. Pundits like Thomas Friedman told us that it’s all “ok” since all America need do is “re-train” and “re-educate”. The former GM autoworker just has to go to college, and he’ll be ready to go take on an even better paying job in no time. This canard is still being passed around by the Obamaites.
Meanwhile, Wall Street and Main Street shenanigans and gimmicks helped mask the effects: first the Internet bubble inspired us with visions of a “New Economy”, then the real estate bubble enticed us to the prospects of an “endless” source of investment income. So long as you could speculate in these markets, you didn’t have to worry about jobs. There was “money in them thar hills” and everyone from PhD’s to Joe Plumber could simply play the market for some cool cash. Economists hailed the rapid post 9/11 “recovery” (not realizing that, with a gutted manufacturing base, most real jobs were disappearing, the economic disaster looming on the horizon being masked by phony equities and real estate numbers).
So now that the proverbial $ hit has hit the fan, everyone is acting “surprised”: No one seems to understand why there are no good jobs and why former plant workers can only find jobs at Mickey Dees or other low-paying McJobs. Economists are still awaiting the arrival of the elusive “high paying, intellectually intensive services job” like some long-awaited Messiah. “It’s all about services,” they tell us.
Of course, we’re really in a way becoming a services oriented society: We serve only ourselves, our narcissism, our self interest, our loathing, our vanity, our naivete, our desire to make a quick buck like we did playing the markets (like playing the horses). This is the long-awaited “services” economy. America doesn’t produce anything anymore. We borrow all our money like some hooked junkie from a loan shark (i.e. China) who in turn rather than helping us pay back our debt entices us with more cheap wares to further sink us into indebtedness (ironically, wares made by labor that used to be our own).
And then we’re surprised why Americans have some of the highest drug abuse rates in the world. Of course we do, we’re trying to make sense of just how the logic of all of this works out. We export our good high-paying manufacturing jobs in exchange for cheap Chinese knock-offs made with heaping spoonfuls of mercury topped off with lead, all for a dollar at your local dollar store. Surely we got a raw deal somewhere, we just can’t figure out where. I mean, it seemed like a “foolproof” plan in the 90s. We know we did right by “globalization,” didn’t we? And just what is globalization anyway? No matter, so long as we can’t define it it must be one of those fancy economic terms that only the smart guy PhD’s can explain, We’ll let them rule our world- thank you Mr. Greenspan and your ilk.
Why do we act so surprised that the jobs aren’t coming back?
Best answer:
Answer by Bob
You must be in my head Alan H. Superb summation. You have also established a lead into the future. The inability to carefully define a problem and then work from there has become a lost skill. I could go on but you are probably already ahead of me. RES
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