Middle class faces extinction

The News-Press ^ | June 15, 2003 | JANE R. JOHNSON, N. Fort Myers

[LaMudBug]

"Write your congressmen to change things soon or they won´t be re-elected"

Can you be more specific what things need to be changed soon? I need something specific to tell my congressman otherwise he might relegate my email to the kook mail pile that comes from the illerate and the socialists.

I hope you are not either of the above.

Have a good day while you are waiting for the "Great Change"

[FITZ]

Restrictions against self determination; including the ability to personally improve one's living conditions

Again ----you keep getting back to the notion of Middle Class ---why it's necessary.

[Willie Green]

A hypothetical situation for you, Willie:
Suppose Boeing was prohibited from signing trade agreements with other nations, who insist on taking a portion of manufacturing as part of the deal?

Considering the National Security implications of the aerospace industry and the dual-use technology applicable to both military and commercial aviation, that should be a common sense restriction to begin with. Frankly, I didn't care much for Boeing's merger with McDonnel-Douglass or the North American Aviation division of Rockwell, but Klintoon was in power and Boeing was his conduit for transferring our technology to the Chicoms. I'd have preferred seeing a North American / McDonnell Douglas merger independent of Boeing. With domestic competition, both companies could focus on technological improvement and new market development rather than simply outsourcing our National Security to the cheapest supplier. Lockheed Martin dropped out of commercial aviation sometime back, even though they're still active in defense contracts. I suppose they could sometime reenter the commercial market, but they seem better positioned to apply their expertise to the blossoming Maglev HSGT sector. Cool! Lockheed has a keen eye for developing markets! I like that kind of vision and corporate flexibility!

You have Airbus out there, willing to deal with anyone with a dollar,

Yeah, the Frenchies are prostitutes.
They were even supplying Saddam Hussein with banned technology.
The heck with them. They have inferior technology anyway.

[FITZ]

If I wanted to start a small business ---where would be my source of capital? The BANK, the bank which would give a middle class person money. I don't even have to know who the investors are, but many of them would be people like myself. A little left over money they decided to invest.

[Pukin Dog]

Poverty leads to instability.

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

If that were true, revolution would be as common as poverty itself. Removing the rights and responsibilities of the Individual are what leads to revolution. If you remove the right of self-determination from a people, you will get revolution almost automatically, without further oppresion of the people.

[kms61]

Another flaw is that there's nothing to stop them from sending the R&D, marketing, and other functions overseas.

As for the macro view of who's going to buy these products in the long run, that's not a concern to the corporate managers. Next year is long term to them. Five years is a lifetime. By the time these chickens come home to roost, they'll have taken their golden parachutes and be playing golf every day. Damned few people in Corporate America think strategically any more.

Free market capitalism is not an immutable Law of the Universe. People will support it only so long as they perceive it to be beneficial to them....and that includes Freepers, as some of these threads have shown.

When the majority--or even a substantial minority--of people believe that this system no longer serves their interest....Watch Out.

[PISANO]

If the RICH are all people making 50k a year or MORE, [as the Gimmies repeatedly remind us], then there is a vibrant and healthy middle class making 25-50k a year. The POOR, those who are making around 500 per week and less seems to be staying about the same. All in all MORE are getting rich and the Middle and Poor are staying about the same.

[Pukin Dog]

If I wanted to start a small business ---where would be my source of capital?

Read carefully, FITZ.

The source of capitol, are those people who place their money in the bank. When more people invest and save, credit restrictions are relaxed, providing more access to that same capital. When economic conditions remove the incentive to save and invest; credit restrictions are tightened, removing available capital from people wishing to better their economic condition.

The Banks are not what you need to worry about; it is the people who would either put money in, or take money OUT, that you should worry about. That is what ultimately determines the health of the economy.

[FITZ]

Revolutions and coups are actually quite common in third world countries. For the same reasons you mentioned, when you have no middle class, a person willing to work hard has no access to capital, no self-determination. They really have nothing left to lose. They may put up with it for a while ----but then a leader rises up and usually the leader is no better than what they had.

[Diddle E. Squat]

Monorail will save the middle class.

[FITZ]

No ---without the middle class putting their money in a bank, there will be no credit. Why would the rich put their money into US banks? They'll put their money in countries where people work and produce. When you don't have jobs, you aren't doing any of that.

[Sonny M]

Some of the dangers that can be had, according to Pat Buchanan, are that if a product is made overseas, and there is a transport dispute, you could be left without anything to sell, there are also issues with companies simply using catelogs, the internet and others to do all of its selling, thus leaving eliminating the sales job or more likely, reducing it in number. It also leave the US in a dangerious position of now having business interests in a foreign land, and if there is a political problem, it has to react and get involved.

One of the biggest fears and crucial ones, are that manufactering jobs are a little bit more stable in general. Sales jobs tend to come and go, and a person that works in sales, tends to change places of employment far more often then somone in manufacturing. The other parts of a service economy, or instability and lack of potential growth. If somone is a real estate salesperson working in an area, he can make a steady living, but if say there are no houses for sale at that moment, or there are to many competitors, he is doomed. He is put in a position where he would have to always expand, and or be forced out.

People in service jobs, since they have a tendancy to go from one place of work to another, lose out on many of the benefits that say working at a company for 20 years brings. A major concern though is becoming dependent on another country for it to supply you, your goods. The biggest knock however, is that, in reality, even service jobs, can be transported, even research and development can be outsourced. As the saying goes, good for the goose, good for the gander. If one can reduce costs by moving manufacturing, why not also the tech support (see India) or the engineering (also so India), one could even move the printing of the catelogs, or the design of the website overseas.

[JoeSchem]

The worst thing that the politicians have done to this country was to sign NAFTA.

Who cares about NAFTA, when all the Mexicans you could ever want to work for you are already here in the United States?

I'm far more concerned about the Mexican invasion, which is keeping our official unemployment rate at six percent while the economy recovers. Figure it out, boys and girls, to talk about NAFTA while illegal immigration is going on is like talking about the common cold while SARS and AIDS are epidemic.

And illegal immigration is an issue that neither Ross Perot nor Ralph Nader dare to touch with a ten foot Hispanolian. Will you discuss it, Willie Green, or are you still in that early-1990s time warp where NAFTA is important and people can survive in Bakersfield without speaking Spanish?

[FITZ]

Working middle class people are what determines the economy for the majority. Of course in countries like Mexico where the few elites are incredibly wealthy, they don't need to care what Mexico's economy is doing. It doesn't affect them in the least ---they've got their access to Pemex and are independently wealthy ---why should it matter to them that the majority are desparate and flooding out of the country? It doesn't matter ---they wouldn't really care if the peasants starve ---that's how little the rich care about the economy.

[Dec31,1999]

If "health insurance" costs are not curbed by using free market strategies, the middle class will, in deed, become extinct. HMO costs are skyrocketing, and unless they are brought under control, people are going to vote for universal health care.

You heard it here first, so don't say you weren't warned.

[nyconse]

The day the middle class ceases to exist is the day this country is finished. Our country has always had upward mobility. If a person worked hard, he/she could succeed: the American Dream.

[sarcasm]

The source of capitol

Your argument might be more persuasive if you knew how to spell.

[Pukin Dog]

Healthy economic conditions will do more to insure security than any governmental restrictions. National security is in better shape, when American companies are not in a position to perform traitorous actions as a means of staying in business.

The reason that the American Aerospace industry is in such bad shape is because of a lack of competition both here and from other nations. North American, McDonnell Douglas, General Dynamics and others are gone because of the very high costs of staying in business, which is directly tied to both government regulation and Union work rules.

Lockheed Martin is responsible for some of the worst waste fraud and abuse of government contracts that it is a wonder they are still around.

Maglev will never take off in this country until contractors can build and do research without having to work around environmentalists, unions and government restrictions raising the costs beyond affordability.

[Pukin Dog]

The rich leaders of Third world nations do not invest their money locally. The large percentage of their assests are stored in numbered Swiss accounts.

There is no ready capital for poor people to use; certainly there is no credit either.

[Pukin Dog]

And just who is it that employs the middle class?