So, what do you propose is the solution? Tax the wealthiest quintile until they are no more than $17,000 above the fourth quintile? You accuse the top quintile of stealing it from the others (”Making out like bandits”) so why not? That will surely take care of the problem.
Your view is far too narrow. You are casting this once again as a battle between labor and management in this country. That was always flawed since the battle is and always has been between labor and labor. Why do you think that the word ‘scab’ has all the baggage and hatred that it connotes? If a management is shackled to its labor force, and the labor force strikes for unmeetable demands, they both may lose. The owners (shareholders) will liquidate if they cannot make a profit. If they can, they must and will hire a replacement labor force. Where is most union violence directed, at management personnel or at replacement workers?
The evolution of the labor market is that the battle of labor vs. labor is now global. There is an inevitable leveling of standards of living and wages that is going on due to exponential growth of international commerce, communications and shipping. As our workers’ conditions decline, conditions for workers in other countries rise (relatively). This is why the ‘power’ rests with the labor consumer. There is a surplus of it.
I’d say, the bottom quintile are people who largely don’t work except in casual, low-skill or part time situations. The folks in the middle three quintiles are the ones at risk, whose jobs may be among those that can be exported. The trend started in manufacturing, but then expanded to IT and ‘information economy’ occupations that were once excellent paying white-collar jobs. Soon it may engulf real professional jobs - it is already occuring. Where was your last CAT scan read? Here or in Mumbai? An electronic image looks the same there as it does here. Wait until robotic surgery gets rolling.
Concurrently, while our education system continues to decline, others are advancing and passing us. Fact is, across pretty broad segments of occupations, our people aren’t any more skilled or productive than workers in other nations, or at least the differential in skill and productivity is often outweighed by the lower cost of compensation, even with added transportation and risk costs factored in.
Sorry, but the unionized, 40 hour medium-skill production line job that paid for a stay-at-home mom, three kids with braces, a new Chevy and a 3 bedroom 1 1/2 bath Cape Cod in the suburbs went out with double knits, lava lamps and Woolworths. We have to keep advancing, keep innovating and keep finding new competitive edges to stay ahead. The people who do that are the ones in your top quintile. They aren’t all the same people all of the time. As another poster pointed out, people move up and down the scale. Twenty years ago, the ability to write HTML and SQL meant an $80,000 income. No more. On the other hand, a CDL driver, critical welder or crane operator working in a shale play can be pulling down that much and more thanks to hydraulic fracturing. Innovation = competitive edge.
SargeK, you make some very good points. As a country we need to rethink how we do some things. Technological progress is going to inevitably make it so that fewer and fewer workers are required to produce more than enough goods and services that the population can consume. That is not necessarily a bad thing. But if certain things aren’t addressed it could potentially be very bad indeed.
Currently we have a society where a job is required to pay for a person’s needs, i.e. food, shelter, medicine, etc. What happens to a society where technology creates a situation where it is nearly impossible to break into the job market? More and better education is certainly one item that will help make people more employable. But you know as well as I do that not everyone is cut out to perform jobs that require a master’s degree or a PhD, heck or even a bachelor’s degree.
So do you leave those people out on the streets to starve and fend for themselves in a black market economy? If you want a french-style revolution then sure. Or do you rearrange your economy before that happens so that the vastly increased wealth provided by technological change is able to be more equitably shared so that families aren’t required to steal or engage in other illegal activities just in order to live? I’m not advocating putting in a pay ceiling or “from each, blah, blah, blah” but there has to be a way to go forward that doesn’t put the majority of the country in the poor house.
I remember reading articles and stories years ago about how as technology progressed society as a whole would become richer and everyone would have more leisure, etc. Unfortunately that doesn’t seem to be playing out. Instead we are seeing a return to s feudalistic type society and I can’t see that ending in a good way.