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This is right out of a South Park episode a while back where the trades folks arrived for work in a Rolls, and the lawyers and bureaucrats were begging for jobs.
And, when one needs true work done, are you gonna call a DemocRAT?
Wsj just discovering this?
I taught at an urban high school. Our school had an awesome carpentry program. Other schools in the district had similar trades programs.
George W. Bush destroyed them all with his idiotic “No Child Left Behind” law. NCLB tested for academic knowledge but not for trades knowledge. And woe to the district that had poor NCLB scores.
So as a matter of self-preservation, many districts dropped their trades programs and shoved the trades students into classes they neither needed nor wanted (into advanced algebra, for example).
I’m retired now. I’m told that the trades programs are slowly coming back. That’s good news. But we shouldn’t forget how W’s stupidity wrecked the field for a good 15 years.
I didn’t come in off the drifter road until my 40s and at some point I decided that I need some sort of permanent work so I started a little plumbing business since I had picked up the service plumbing trade at some point.
Plumbing service work is fun and lucrative if you are good at it, unfortunately for me I had started so late in life that old injuries and new medical problems interrupted any long term plans but I it was great work when I could do it.
In my case I charged top dollar for top work and customer care, was very picky and selective about who I accepted as customers, I worked a glamorous part of the coast, and I could live my personal life while only working a few days a month and scheduling calls from 11am to 2pm which suited me fine although sometimes I would be so engrossed in my reading and living that when a plumbing call came in I would have to take a moment to remember that the interruption was because I had a plumbing business.
The medical stuff cut short my money growth and I ended up drained financially but I had paid cash for a small house during that time and that was a cool thing to come out of it with for basically a parttime job that I liked and having never put my nose to the grind stone.
A million dollars isn’t what it used to be. A million dollars in 1960 is the equivalent of $10,761,126 today.
Those who can be in the electrician, plumbing, construction, and craft fields (i.e. woodworking) will never want for work or for money.
As for those who went to college and racked up a hundred thousand dollars in student loans for gender studies, well, sorry, you are condemned to a life of poverty unless you have a trust fund from mommy and daddy.
Soon robots will take over all the menial jobs that most college kids are stuck with such as taking orders at a drive-in, making lattes at Starbucks, or flipping burgers at McDonalds. But if you can make custom-ordered furniture in your garage workshop or repair a faulty HVAC unit, your future is assured.
The Millionaire Next Door was mostly made up of interviews of blue collar business owners. The book came out in the mid 90’s.