[lelio]

at for-profit trade schools that could benefit once middle-class students realize

realize that a degree is pretty much worthless as foreigner will do your job for 1/20th of the cost? And that our trade rep Zoellick supports this?

[GaConfed]

This is the most straight up, turthful article I have seen yet on where we are and where we are headed economically. I wouldn't even worry about it if the items mentioned weren't mostly things that are necessities of life.

Also, the last paragraph about education was profound indeed. Maybe people will quite looking at universities as glorified trade schools and recognize them for what they should be; that is NOT places to learn to be productive citizens, but rather places to be GOOD citizens.

[LibertyAndJusticeForAll]

from the article:
There are specific economic forces that will continue to hold the middle class down, says Hess.
Here are some of the events and trends that he sees working together to create a middle-class slide: the export of technical jobs and the continued unemployment of many American tech workers; the squeeze on state economies that will result in higher state taxes, fewer state services, and higher-priced state educations; the triple threat of high health-care costs, high debt burdens and continued weak stock prices and battered portfolios.
As a result, even the upper-middle class is starting to downscale spending habits and life style.

[Southack]

"It's no secret that the U.S. has been on a rich-get-richer, poor-get-poorer track for several years."

The poor get poorer?!

What nonsense!

Who wants to assert that the "poor" today physically earn **less** than the poor of "several years" ago?

The "Poverty Level" today is around $14,000 per year for an average household. That's more than the middle-class average income in the 1950's.

The poor get "poorer"?!

I think not.

[q_an_a]

"It's no secret that the U.S. has been on a rich-get-richer, poor-get-poorer track for several years. "

This ought to give the reader a good view of the political view point of the author. Of course he leaves out that many families have switched from 2 incomes to one and that as with any mature economy, there are going to be times when growth slows especially when the boomer generations kids are waiting 4-5 years later in life to marry, have children and buy homes. This story could have been written by Jayson Blair.

[narses]

How does the Catholic voter feel about this trend?

[LiteKeeper]

SITREP

[ELS]

the continued unemployment of many American tech workers

Sigh, just what I need to see...

[rdb3]

It's no secret that the U.S. has been on a rich-get-richer, poor-get-poorer track for several years.

True to form, Reuters publishes left-wing class warfare talking points. And FR's resident doom-and-gloomers lap it up like thirsty canines.

I'm deeply saddened. </sarcasm>

[Matchett-PI]

Why U.S. Manufacturing Won't Die - by Clare Ansberry

Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal - 7-3-03

What role will U.S. manufacturing play in the national and global economies in the coming years? What jobs will be left for American workers?

It's more than an academic question for many company owners. Stan Donnelly, who owns Donnelly Custom Manufacturing Co. in Minnesota, is studying Mandarin in case he has to move his machines to China. Already, he buys molds from China to make his custom-designed plastic parts. To date, Mr. Donnelly has been able to keep production of those parts in the U.S. But as his customers increasingly demand lower prices, he wonders if he will one day need to move production to Asia as well.

Many experts believe that the pattern of past years will continue -- that low-skilled jobs making lower-value, mass-produced items will keep migrating to countries where labor is plentiful and cheap, while manufacturing in industrial nations, such as the U.S., Japan and Western Europe, will center on complex, value-added products and systems. Demand for more sophisticated luxury cars and ever-more elaborate communication systems will keep fueling highly automated machinery and processes. Many of those higher-margin, technology-intensive production will remain in the U.S., and should help keep jobs here becoming steadily better, safer and higher paid than in earlier generations.

Other jobs serving certain protected markets, like medical instruments that are carefully monitored and require collaboration between doctors, hospitals and producers, should also remain, as will those involved with making something big and bulky, like kitchen cabinets that are costly to ship, or perishable items like frozen food and bread.

"There's not enough boats in the world to bring all that Americans want into the U.S.," says W.R. Timken Jr., chairman of the century-old maker of bearings as small as marbles or big enough for a person to walk through. His company has operations all over the world, but still needs plants in the U.S. to make bearings for cars, trucks, helicopters and X-ray machines made here.

Demand will also escalate for basic goods like washing machines, cars and telephones in parts of the world where many people have never had them before. That will keep global assembly lines humming, as well as fueling demand for ever-more automated systems to operate them more efficiently.

In short, demand for manufacturing will remain robust for both the developed and developing world, concluded a two-year study by the Manufacturers Alliance, a public policy and business research group in Arlington, Va. "Every industry has certain pieces of manufacturing that will shift abroad, but also pieces that will remain in the U.S. because they embody high technology within that product," says Daniel Meckstroth, chief economist with the Manufacturers Alliance. "Over time it will evolve."

That isn't to say higher-skilled jobs won't also move overseas eventually. Already work forces in some developing nations are upgrading their skills and winning contracts to produce higher-end products. At the same time, the wage gap will continue to narrow as workers in developing nations grow more prosperous and develop a taste for a better standard of living.

So, what is likely to pull manufacturing overseas in coming decades? Cheap and available energy. Signs of such a trend are already here: Aluminum producer Alcoa Inc. is building a smelter in Iceland because of cheap hydroelectric power. The same plentiful power has attracted interest from Russian Aluminum and Alcan.

What will ensure U.S. manufacturing's future is innovation, just as it has in the past. A sheet of glass made by Pittsburgh-based PPG Industries Inc. is now self-cleaning, its coating breaks down and loosens organic dirt, which means less work for cleaning-averse consumers. The average car contains between 200 and 300 types of steel designed to be lighter for better fuel efficiency, yet strong enough to protect a passenger. In a decade, there will be yet more composite materials.

Beyond automobiles, even clothes and computers will be increasingly customized. It will require tremendous flexibility to innovate and get a product to the market quickly, as well as to integrate new technology and processes.

The U.S. will undoubtedly continue to lose jobs in areas like textiles, where both labor and materials are plentiful overseas. But positions in computer and mathematical occupations are expected to increase 29% in the coming decade.

Other hot jobs are expected to focus on industrial automation equipment, such as robotics. The U.S. Department of Labor projects that those jobs will grow faster than the economy as a whole and, in particular, even exceed growth in manufacturing. Toys and sporting goods, drugs, garden machinery, motor vehicles, metal coating and screw machine products, bolts and rivets industries are all in the top 25% manufacturing industries for both productivity growth and job growth, the Labor Department says.

In fact, U.S. manufacturers are increasingly worried about a serious projected shortage in skilled machinists and other factory workers.

That kind of demand will continue to make blue-collar life not only better, but also more critical to the health of the nation's economy. As Mr. Donnelly, the owner of the small Minnesota manufacturer, notes, a brilliant idea is worthless unless it can be made into something tangible and distributed. "That is what drives the economy and wealth of a society," he says.

Write to Clare Ansberry at clare.ansberry@wsj.com

[GatekeeperBookman]

The new burdens of taxation ( multiplied by inflation & enabled by removal from the Gold standard ) & the new discrimination make us all re-calculate what we will produce for our masters of the Left. Our perspectives change entirely when our liberties are crushed by economics & our future prospects truncated by the amoebic growth of goverment-federal, state & local.

A whole new class of Re-fusenicks is born. Ordinary, productive Americans of all stripes are about to realize they are on a new sort of plantation. Our personal economics are far more defensive than that of our parents.

[GatekeeperBookman]

1984.

Newspeak.

The perverted thought ( of the Left ) runs through every compartment of society, like a computor virus or worm.

Downscaling is a bogus term for real decline. Even Wall Street pays for bogus research which only obfuscates & distracts.

Every gov entity, fed, state & local has gone mad with expenditures of infalted paper money. The tax load built into every product & service is beyond calculation.
Goods & services must pay the load of every tax imposed on their suppliers, all employees in the chain of supply & all personal & property taxes of every entity which touches the product or service. The consumer uses inflated, tax reduced dollars to pay further taxes on the product/service when he buys it.

The reaction of the wealthy & the middle clases ( there are several levels ) is 'downscaling'! What a nice term.

[Mamzelle]

re:Maybe that's not all a bad thing. Perhaps if everyone is worrying about their money, they will spend less on empty status items, and nobody will have to be ashamed of being budget conscious. It might even be considered cool to shop the sales. )))

Gee, thanks. Can you refer me to the Dollar Store of health insurance?

[afraidfortherepublic]

Well, I don't know much about saving money, except that I don't have any. However, I made myself a spiffy shirt for a 4th of July party by sewing a patriotic applique over a split in the back of a tomato red linen shirt that I could not bear to throw away. A smaller, coordinating applique on the collar makes my "new" shirt look like a designer number.

No one knows the difference, and I was proud to wear it. Got lots of compliments, too.