Nice rant.
But you and Kristof miss the elephant in the room entirely.
Working class jobs are still out there in rural areas. They go to low wage illegal aliens.
Mid level factory jobs still exist. They go to non-whites who are hired to meet racial quotas or because they choose their own kind over whites when they are in supervisory positions. Have seen this over the last 30 years on steroids. Same is true of white collar and engineering jobs.
Outsourcing to China is huge as a problem, but immigration is even bigger: it’s really hard to dislodge a human being who made it into the country to engage in wage competition. Far easier to simply increase a tariff schedule.
IMMIGRATION is the biggest problem for working class Americans who don’t have hyphens in front of the “American” label. That means white people. The black people already get preferences but their pathologies prevent them from doing a lot more: nobody moves a company to Detroit to take advantage of the labor force.
Raising the minimum wage to real value reflective of inflation will do nothing if off the books wage cutters are still allowed in the game. Without immigration enforcement, the cheaters will be allowed to run all the way to the goal line.
Rural drug problems are more of a symptom, not a cause. People do that when they lose hope and decide it’s all to hard.
The libs have been pouring gas on this fire for 30 years once they figured out the aliens could be given the vote and keep them in power. Prior to that they were ostensibly on the side of the Workin’ Man.
Insourcing (immigration/H1B) + Outsourcing (China/India) = Job Annihilation
End both.
Like the NYT authors, neither of you connects the dots between the economic or policy factors you identify and the drugs, crime, and car wrecks of the principals in the story.
Wow. Great stuff here. I started to mention illegal aliens (loss of American identity) but I thought this was too long already. It also would have led to the scourge of liberalism, which could have been another few pages. But you are absolutely right.
I noticed the article’s starting period was 2007-2008, when Daddy Knapp bought a house and the new Mustang for his 16 year old son with the income from his pipe fitting job, read plumbing job, right before the sudden massive collapse of the housing and building market.
What do you want to bet that Daddy Knapp lost his lucrative building trade job in the collapse of the building trades, a job which funded his mortgage and car payment for his son’s Mustangs in 2008-2009 and they lost the house which they bought on a Flex loan, and the car was repossessed? I saw way too many lower income people who bought McMansions they couldn’t afford because unscrupulous mortgage “bankers” illegally misrepresented their incomes to put them into houses they could never pay back on their real incomes when the flex loans readjusted to actual cost loans, to say nothing of those who could not survive a hiccough in their financial conditions.
That’s the real reason Daddy Knapp and his income was not mentioned again in this article.
Also, it does not mention the drugs that Daddy and Mommy Knapp (remember the bowl of Cocaine pictured in the background), of which both were obvious users, came across a southern US border which the Democrats kept resembling a broken sieve. . . And want to open even more now. That open border policy also brought in hordes of illegal workers who depressed wages that Daddy and Mommy Knapp could have earned, when sober, to better raise their family of children. . . But that Democrats wanted as a matter of policy to eventually vote illegally and later legally for Democrats, the Knapp’s survival could just go hang.
Further, the education that the Knapp children received that could have prepared them to succeed economically in the future was denied them by Democrat, progressive policies of progressive indoctrination rather than actual education for success. Valuable class time was not dedicated to learning skills useful in future employment, but instead spent wasting time being force fed useless social justice tripe, turning the children into little social justice automatons, who know how to put a condom on a banana, but not how to add or parse a sentence, or the history of their own country, or how their country’s government runs. This is NOT something we can blame Capitalism for, but rather for deliberate planning of the Democrat party, and the progressive Leftists who have taken it over.