Why I'm depressed about the future of America.

Originally posted by hezro
reply to post by milominderbinder

 

Yes, and I believe keeping the internet open will be the success or failure of our time. At the moment the internet is a chaos of extremes, but adolescence is always this way. Over time the chaos will congeal into a bell curve of intellectual realists with real solutions and willing compromise.

Eventually those in power will find that the people they controlled through fear no longer have those fears. They speak with those they formerly feared and find their commonalities along with their differences. I feel this is a generational process, not a process of a fear years or even a decade or two. We may look back at this time and see it is being as significant as the enlightenment or the industrial age... or even those two combined.

I don't know what the future holds for America, but I think the future for the world, as a whole, is very bright.

Agreed. In the LONG RUN the future is very, very, bright assuming barring a complete destruction of sort which we bring on ourselves. However...the SHORT RUN looks mighty miserable to me...but I don't really care. I'm GenX...for me it's about the world my kids will have to deal with. I've pretty much resigned myself to the fact that it will take the 20-30 years to de-screw the handy work of Baby Boomers.

As for it being a generational problem...you are ABSOLUTELY correct. If you do NOTHING ELSE in 2013 PLEASE READ THIS BOOK! "Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069" by Neil Howe and William Strauss. It's retailing for $11.20 on Amazon right now.
Link: www.amazon.com...=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1354301229&sr=8-1&keywords=generations+the+history +of+america%27s+future

I read it when I was in high school shortly after it came out in 1992... and it remains the single most influential book I have ever read, bar none. Previous to reading it I had always liked history...but this book is what ultimately influenced me to pursue my Master's degree in the subject. It was the first time I ever REALLY saw what was possible by studying history as a rich tapestry as opposed to simply a series of chronological events on a linear timeline. The best news? It's even MORE relevant today than it was when it came out. The predictions they made for the last 20 years or so have all basically occurred pretty much just like clockwork.

I really don't believe it's truly possible to truly UNDERSTAND U.S. History without reading this book, irrespective of how many dates, places, people, and battles one has memorized.

If you read it...I promise you will never, EVER, see the world again in the same way.

reply to post by milominderbinder

I'm GenX...for me it's about the world my kids will have to deal with. I've pretty much resigned myself to the fact that it will take the 20-30 years to de-screw the handy work of Baby Boomers.

This is a sad truth that I've come to accept lately. The goal of working to 60 and retiring to a life of ease and enjoyment seems quaint in the current environment. Instead the goal is now educating my children and doing what I can to provide an environment where they are not forced to pursue meaningless work to simply acquire the necessities.

Thanks for the book suggestion, I'll definitely be looking that up.

reply to post by itsthetooth

Problem with everything you say is it will drain our economy and kill it. Increasing the wage just forces more jobs overseas. Your mistake is assuming amercans deserve a wage increase. They don't. To deserve it you need the skills and the aptitude. The issue is that people in asia and in other countries are increasingly outpacing americans by acquiring higher level skills and achieving better work performance. The result of all this is that the american wage should be going down, not up. By keeping it where it's or by increasing it, you'd be destroying employment and making it worse.

There's an entitlement problem in america. It's rooted in the democrat party. They're blind to the situation and unable to form solutions. Voting democrat should be classified a mental illness.

We live in a new world. America is not the best and greatest anymore. We've let this happen over the past 50 years by sleeping on the job. The consequence is that we must pay the price. The earlier we pay, the sooner we can get back on the ladder and climb it. Until then, it's time to get real.

Originally posted by jonnywhite
reply to post by itsthetooth

 

Problem with everything you say is it will drain our economy and kill it. Increasing the wage just forces more jobs overseas. Your mistake is assuming amercans deserve a wage increase. They don't. To deserve it you need the skills and the aptitude. The issue is that people in asia and in other countries are increasingly outpacing americans by acquiring higher level skills and achieving better work performance. The result of all this is that the american wage should be going down, not up. By keeping it where it's or by increasing it, you'd be destroying employment and making it worse.

This is true, but there are other factors to this as well. In order to pay us lower, you must also lower our cost of living, or else it would be pointless to do so without killing our economy and sending us onto the path of becoming a third world country. The fact is just by lowering the wages, it won't automatically do this, and thus you'll destroy our country by lowering our wages too. The ultimate problem is a societal issue that overflows onto the economic portion. People go into business not to make a living for themselves, but to make more money than everyone else. This makes it so every year, your goal is to make more than the last, not make a living off of it. This alone causes inflation because it saturates money into a select few people. Don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating taking the money away from the rich and giving it to the poor, I'm just against oligarchy as much as I am against socialism. Corporations are as much to blame for the issue as the workers demanding more money.

There's an entitlement problem in america. It's rooted in the democrat party. They're blind to the situation and unable to form solutions. Voting democrat should be classified a mental illness.

There is an entitlement problem in America, I will not deny this fact. But it isn't just poor wanting to be handed more. And it isn't rooted in the Democrat Party either. It is rooted in both parties. The Republicans are just as much to blame as the Democrats. With this, it makes me wonder if there really is a difference between the two. Democrats want to hand out entitlements to the lower class and the poor. They want to keep raising the minimum wage for the upper poor class and lower middle class. They want to hand everything to everyone. While the Republicans want to hand everything to everyone else. The Democrats hand feed the poor and lower middle class and Republicans hand feed the upper middle class and the rich. The "Too big to fail" companies ring a bell? That is as much welfare as the checks the poor get on a monthly basis. Not to mention all the tax cut corporations get and the higher income families get for various things that no way in hell a poor person could be in a position to even reach for. If I were to believe voting for any party should be classified as a mental illness, it would be voting for Democrat and Republican parties both. And there in lies the issue.

We live in a new world. America is not the best and greatest anymore. We've let this happen over the past 50 years by sleeping on the job. The consequence is that we must pay the price. The earlier we pay, the sooner we can get back on the ladder and climb it. Until then, it's time to get real.

This is a little more complicated than that. Partly, I agree with your about living in a new world, and that America is not the best and greatest anymore. But how did we let this happen? Several ways. We got lazy, sure, but it isn't our work output or anything of that sort. It can be blamed in the fact that the majority of Americans only do business with big corporations because it is convenient. There used to be specialty shops that only dealt in say clothing, then you had your local grocery store, and then you might have had your television and radio shop. Then an appliance shop, a bakery, etc. etc. Then we got lazy and wanted to buy all those things in one spot. This is where the corporations grabbed us by the... well you get the picture. We handed this country over to the rich by doing this. Top this off with allowing those free trade agreements which basically gave the keys to the corporations to send the jobs overseas thus taking it away from us to lower their labor costs and upping their profit, and thus we have this mess. It was only a matter of time. How much industry do we have in this country? Your solution is to pay us lower amounts to bring them back, but you know corporations aren't gonna go for that because then we won't buy as much still, and their income levels will drop.

These problems aren't solved because both sides have a couple of pieces to this jigsaw puzzle, but won't put them together, and then search for the others.

reply to post by jonnywhite

Problem with everything you say is it will drain our economy and kill it. Increasing the wage just forces more jobs overseas. Your mistake is assuming amercans deserve a wage increase. They don't. To deserve it you need the skills and the aptitude. The issue is that people in asia and in other countries are increasingly outpacing americans by acquiring higher level skills and achieving better work performance. The result of all this is that the american wage should be going down, not up. By keeping it where it's or by increasing it, you'd be destroying employment and making it worse.

There's an entitlement problem in america. It's rooted in the democrat party. They're blind to the situation and unable to form solutions. Voting democrat should be classified a mental illness.

We live in a new world. America is not the best and greatest anymore. We've let this happen over the past 50 years by sleeping on the job. The consequence is that we must pay the price. The earlier we pay, the sooner we can get back on the ladder and climb it. Until then, it's time to get real

Being domocrat does not mean handicapp.
If you think that the problem is that americans aren't trained as well as other countries, then they need to be trained, thats all. It has nothing to do with business packing up and moving over seas. If it does than the problem is what allows that option. You could say poor employees but thats just a cop out. It's actually a problem from the people that want to pack up and move over seas. They are basically saying that their money is worth more to them in stead of investing or reinvesting into americans. Thats not a democratic issue, its a lack of faith in your own country and those people are living in the wrong country.

reply to post by noxvita83


I agree with you nox, and I didn't want to vote for either the republicans or the democrats because of this. They are always about corporate america first, and I don't feel thats our immediate needs at this time. But trying to get a nation to switch their views off the two is impossible.

Next election either a green piece party will be voted in or democratic will be voted in again. One thing that has been apparent for far to long is that business has been taken care of for decades and it's been screwing our debt. We have managed to place business over our own debt, over our own employees and now they are so greedy and used to it that they want to suceed from the nation if they don't get more tax breaks.

Capitalist pigs!

Things are just a tad to unfair

mcdonnalds CEO wages

reply to post by SpookyFoxMulder


fighting for better wages