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You have to actually be educated to be a plummer, electrician or carpenter...there is math to deal with and all those nasty building codes.

Uneducated means that you have zero ability and zero skills other than being able to do as you are told, and our schools are pumping these types of people out in droves...no..scratch that..they can't even do as they are told.

If you were working in a car plant making $18.00 an hour and your company moved to Mexico I doubt you would feel very comforted to know that the median salary is rising in the US while you were working your brand new, permanent, $7.50 an hour job.

Statistics of salaries going up and salaries going down don't matter to people who are seeing their lively hood flying out the window. all they know is that they just got permanently screwed, and that's all that matters to them.

I also heard Bush saying how he wanted to move Americans into more high tech roles such as computer oriented jobs and the like. I hate to tell him that many Americans are not educated enough for nor interested in such jobs, and they are never going to be.

A healthy economy provides a safe niche for all categories of workers. There are plenty of people who are perfectly satisfied and happy to dig ditches with a backhoe or work in a factory for their entire lives. Those jobs should be available for those people in this country not in China or Guatemala. There is no way we are going to push those type people into some fantasy high-tech job.

A healthy economy is just like an ecosystem that is based on a food chain. When you start pushing one type of worker out of the chain you overload another portion of the food chain and eventually the whole thing will collapse. NAFTA and CAFTA are going to see to it that our little economic food chain goes down the tubes.

The Clinton and the Bush administrations both threw up smoke screens to try and make the public believe that NAFTA wasn't hurting America.

There were two typed of jobs available here for my students..Factory or service industry. 85% of our factories are now gone out of country and the service end of the food chain is now overloaded. This scenario is being played out in small towns all over America, and statistics and smoke screens won't make it go away.

"Uneducated means that you have zero ability and zero skills other than being able to do as you are told"

Sorry, usually when people claim that no one can make it without an education, they’re speaking of something like a high school diploma or more. I take you at your word that you were referring to no skills or OJT and ability to even do what they are told.

"If you were working in a car plant making $18.00 an hour and your company moved to Mexico I doubt you would feel very comforted to know that the median salary is rising in the US while you were working your brand new, permanent, $7.50 an hour job."

It would inspire me to no end to know that median real wages in the US was continuously rising if my careered dropped out from under me. There is nothing “permanent” about ones job.

Knowing that the US economy was just changing rather than failing, as all dynamic capitalist economies should, I’d be heartened to know that I could relocate and start a new career if I were young enough or that my kids could prosper if only they made better career decisions that I. It would comfort me to know claims like, "people are employed alright...and making less than half of what they were." are misleading at best.