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Homelessness like this, child, has not been a problem for decades. It has gotten to be a major problem in the past three years as manufacturing has collapsed due to "free trade" policies

I hate to sound cold, but then those people who have become unemployed need to find other industries where their labor will be better allocated, for their own good and society's.

I know you're making an emotional play talking about blue collar manufacturing folk (I'm picturing a John Mellencamp video in my head as I type this, "Little Pink Houses" maybe?) but I look at the example of all those programmers being hired for huge money at the dotcom's about 3 or 4 years ago. Guess what, now that the dotcom industry basically collapsed, or more accurately, corrected itself by stripping itself to the bare necessitites (the one that laid me off 2.5 years ago actually turned an operating profit this quarter, after slashing jobs from about 170 to 20 and making their software install more automated) a lot of these programmers are either unemployed or having to take lower salaries. What's the answer? To bitch and whine? To call on President Bush to protect or subsidize (like the farmers) their jobs? Ooooooooooor, to get certification and traiing in some other type of software programming?

The solution is to face the fact that no certification or training will protect you from the fact that someone in Bangalore with precisely the same qualifications as you will do your job for a tenth of your pay unless the US government takes your side and sets in place some tariff protection. This applies to each and every job that does not require face to face contact and every factory job. All the Dale Carnegie peptalk in the world is meaningless in the face of this hard economic reality. There is nothing you can do to compete with this kind of wage differential all by yourself and imagining that you can get "training" in "some other kind of software programming" where India and China and outsourcing do not exist is wishful thinking.