The American Dream Is On Life Support, And Most Of You Have No Idea What It Really Was
By David Grace (www.DavidGraceAuthor.com)
The American Dream was never that this was the only country where really talented people could rise to the top and get rich.
Smart, talented, determined people becoming successful is almost inevitable in any modern, industrial society.
The real American Dream was that any average, ordinary, Joe Sixpack, high-school graduate who was willing to show up for work every day and live by the rules would be able to have a decent, middle-class life.
The American Dream was that John Q. Citizen with average intelligence and a high school diploma could get a full-time job that would pay him enough money to buy a little house, get a used car, have a dentist fix his kid’s tooth when he got a cavity, take the family to the beach for a week every summer, and buy a few toys for the kids, a cloth coat for the wife, and a turkey dinner for the family every year at Christmas.
Sure, the wife usually worked too when the kids were old enough to be left on their own or with grandma or Aunt Sally to babysit them. That’s where the extra money came from for a new set of tires or dad’s hernia operation.
And there was always a little money left over to be put in the bank for a rainy day.
That’s the middle-class life I grew up in. And, as a society, it worked.
Then, somewhere along the way a decision was made, or, if not made, allowed.
Somebody, or a group of somebodies, decided that America would be better off if those good-paying manufacturing jobs that supported that meat-and-potatoes middle-class lifestyle were traded away in exchange for much cheaper “stuff” produced by extremely low-paid foreign labor.
The theory was that (1) cheap products produced abroad were better for our society than expensive products produced at home and (2) foreign trade would create new jobs to replace the old ones that were lost.
That theory enriched the working class in the “third world” countries and vastly impoverished the working class in the United States. It also vastly enriched the upper classes in both locations.
And it did lead to lots of cheap stuff and many new jobs but, unfortunately, those new jobs weren’t the sort that could be performed by the people whose old jobs were taken away.
The thing is, a high-school graduate who tightened a bolt on an assembly line or carried a pallet of spare parts from one part of the factory to another had neither the talent nor the training to operate an MRI machine or write the microcode for a new household gadget.
And most U.S. businesses refused to train the workers they did need. It was cheaper to bring in already trained programmers, engineers, doctors and the like from countries like India. The government, always ready to help businesses increase their short-term profits, was happy to let them do just that
The taxpayers who still had jobs weren’t willing to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to train the Joe Sixpacks of America for the new jobs that off-shore manufacturing had created, even if good old thirty-five-year-old high-school graduate Joe had the smarts and the talent to become a registered nurse or social-media marketing specialist, which, of course, he didn’t.
People tried to train themselves. They borrowed an astonishing one trillion, two hundred billion dollars to go to school. Yes, the current, outstanding student loan debt is in excess of one trillion, two hundred billion dollars.
And not only has all that borrowing failed to make a dent in the problem, the destruction of the middle class is continuing.
The idea that high-school graduates who have no skills that will earn them a living wage can borrow enough money to dig themselves out of this hole by retraining themselves is beyond fantasy land.
The American Dream that anyone who was of just average intelligence, reasonably physically fit, and who was willing to work a full-time job could have a decent, lower-middle-class life, has keeled over and gone on life support.
Lots of things could have been done to prevent that.
1) We could have required employers who wanted to move factories to a foreign country to themselves pay the costs to retrain all their fired workers.
2) Or, they could have been told that they could move their factories but that they couldn’t sell anything produced in those moved-factories in the United States.
3) We could have adopted a policy that if you want to sell in the U.S. you have to hire in the U.S.
If 30% of your world-wide sales are in the United States then 30% of your world-wide payroll has to be in the United States, or you have to pay a tax based on some percentage of the shortfall, with the proceeds of that tax being spent on job training.
4) We could have raised the minimum wage to the level of what those lost factory jobs were paying and guaranteed everyone a minimum wage job, even if it was raking leaves, picking up trash, or babysitting the children of working parents.
5) We could have substantially limited the number of H-1 visas and forced companies to train Americans to fill their available jobs instead of letting them take the easy and cheap way out of hiring already-trained foreigners;
6) We could have established a tax and regulatory structure where companies could train Americans to fill their job needs and recoup part of the cost from the employees’ initial salaries for a limited period of time and the rest from tax incentives.
7) There are undoubtedly lots of other things we could have done to counteract the damage from losing the good-paying, unskilled jobs that were the backbone of the lower middle class.
But we did none of them. Now, the middle class and the American Dream are on life support.
We can already see that food-service jobs are on the way out. Self-ordering terminals and robot waiters are likely to decimate that unskilled job market over the next five to ten years.
Considering the rising smart car technology, how many people are going to be making their living as bus drivers, Uber drivers or cab drivers ten years from now?
When you lose your middle class you lose political stability.
Why do you think people are willing to vote for a greedy, dishonest, megalomaniac, narcissist like Donald Trump?
Because he’s a demagogue who promises the disposed, angry and fearful that he will fix everything if they will just give him power.
If 10%, 15%, 20% of the population can’t earn a lower-middle-class living wage how do you think that’s going to affect crime, gangs, and drugs?
Police, courts and prisons are hugely expensive and they are only a band-aid. The real cost of a destroyed middle class is living in a society where shootings, robberies, gangs, drugs and assaults are a normal fact of life.
Look at Chicago.
Last year there were approximately 26,000 car burglaries in San Francisco out of approximately 400,000 total registered autos. In one year approximately 6% of all registered cars were broken into.
How do you think those numbers are going increase as the number of people who can’t earn a living wage rises even higher?
You want to “fix” this country?
Rebuild the middle class.
You want to rebuilt the middle class?
Create or bring back living-wage jobs for ordinary, average-intelligence, untrained, high-school graduates.
Today the American Dream is like Sleeping Beauty, comatose and slipping away.
Is there anyone out there who will step up and be her Prince Charming?
–David Grace
DavidGraceAuthor.com
