On July 9, 2012 Paul Buccheit writes on Buzzflash At Truthout about how young people are being drafted into an economic war that they don’t understand. Young America, here’s why you should be angry:
1. The Great WEALTH Transfer
— 18- to 35-year-olds: Your median net worth has dropped 68 percent since 1984. It’s now less than $4,000.
— The Richest 1 percent: They tripled their share of income between 1980 and 2006, then took 93 percent of all the new income in the first year after the 2008 recession. Their median net worth is now over $5,000,000.
2. The Lack of JOBS: No one’s hiring, so you have to “create your own job.”This from Michael Barone of the Washington Examiner: “The good news is that information technology provides the iPod/Facebook generation with the means to find work and create careers that build on their own personal talents and interests…creating your own career will produce a stronger sense of satisfaction and fulfillment.”
Sounds easy, doesn’t it? Just grab your iPhone, open up Facebook, and create your own job. Become an entrepreneur, just like the richest Americans. Except that the richest Americans aren’t entrepreneurs. Based on U.S. tax return data, only 3 percent of the wealthiest 130,000 Americans are entrepreneurs. Most are in management or finance.
As your parents and mentors, we told you to stay in school and work hard and everything would be fine. But you don’t have jobs. Over half of college graduates were jobless or underemployed in 2011. More than 350,000 Americans with advanced degrees were receiving food stamps or some other form of public assistance.
If you do have a job, it’s probably not paying much. Salaries for new graduates dropped 10% just in the last year. Worse yet, most of you are dealing with college loan debt, which averages $24,000, and with the reality of zero net worth for over a third of you.
As wages are hitting an all-time low, corporate profits are hitting an all-time high. But the corporations that have built their profits on American innovation and labor are telling you they don’t need you anymore. Apple — much admired for its slick products — shows little respect for anyone below upper management. With 47,000 employees, about 1/10 the number employed by IBM, Apple makes a profit of $420,000 per employee. Yet most Apple store workers make about $12 per hour.
And your representatives in Washington are no help. In October, 2011 Senate Republicans killed a proposed $447 billion jobs bill that would have added about two million jobs to the economy. Nearly two-thirds of the American public had supported the bill.
3. The Portrayal of EDUCATION as a “lifetime investment”Yes, it’s a lifetime investment, for the holder of your student loans.
As corporate profits and CEO salaries and incomes of the 1 percent have surged over the past ten years, education financing declined by 24 percent, and tuition at state schools increased 72 percent. Since 1985, while consumer prices have approximately doubled, tuition has risen almost 600 percent.
Total state education cuts for fiscal 2012 were $12.7 billion. A study by Citizens for Tax Justice noted that 265 of our nation’s largest companies avoided about the same amount in state taxes each year from 2008 to 2010.
So your massive tuition bills are paid for with mounting student debt, which has more than tripled in the past ten years. Here again my own generation has deceived you. Our once-idealistic anti-war activists now excel at flashy marketing and sloganeering, with admissions pitches of “affordability” and “lifetime investment,” and carefully avoided references to costs and debts and contracts.
To make up for lost revenue, cutbacks continue and educational opportunities disappear. State colleges are eliminating expensive-to-run engineering and computer science departments. Arizona doubled college tuition in four years. California K-12 schools have one counselor for every 800 students. Ohio’s Governor Kasich suggested rationing college majors among state schools. Illinois cut 2012 educational funding by a greater percentage than any other state; not to be outdone, Pennsylvania’s Governor Corbett tried to cut higher education funding by half, and New Hampshire DID cut university funding by half. Florida’s college tuition is up 15% in a year, Nevada’s is up 13%, Tennessee’s about 10%, Washington’s 24% over two years.
Hell No, We Won’t Go Into Servitude
College graduates, you shouldn’t be working for $12 an hour. The computer and networking technologies that gave life to companies like Apple and Google grew out of 50 years of public research. It was an accomplishment of society, not of a few well-positioned individuals. You, the descendants of industry pioneers, and the potential creators of even greater technologies, deserve at the very least a decent-paying job.
Your anti-war protest, if a time-weathered opinion matters, would include a flood of job demands at the offices of U.S. and state senators and representatives. In person and online. You are part of the fastest and most sophisticated means of communication ever devised. You have the power to make demands.
But first you have to get mad.
This editorial REALLY GETS IT!
Without a policy shift to broaden productive capital ownership simultaneously with economic growth, further development of technology and globalization will undermine the American middle class and make it impossible for more than a minority of citizens to achieve middle-class status.
President Obama stated: “What’s at stake is whether this will be a country where working people can earn enough to raise a family, build a modest savings, own a home, and secure their retirement.” As long as working people are limited by earning income solely through their labor worker wages, they will be left behind by the continued gravitation of economic bounty toward the top 1 percent of the people that the system is rigged to benefit. Working people and the middle class will continue to stagnate, resulting in a stagnated consumer economy. More troubling is that this continued stagnation will further dim the economic hopes of America’s youth, no matter what their education level. The result will have profound long-term consequences for the nation’s economic health and further limit equal earning opportunity and spread income inequality. As the need for labor decreases and the power and leverage of productive capital increases, the gap between labor workers and capital owners will increase, which will result in upheaval.
The BIG ISSUE, which is the cause, is not being presented or discussed!!
Both Obama and Romney should realize that the continual focus on full employment means, “full toil and waste for all forever.” They need to address the question of how are all individuals to be adequately productive when a tiny minority (productive capital owners) produce a major share and the vast majority (labor workers), a minor share of total products and services, and thus, how do we get from a world in which the most productive factor—physical capital—is owned by a handful of people, to a world where the same factor is owned by a majority—and ultimately 100 percent—of the consumers, while respecting all the constitutional rights of present capital owners?
The problem is that we simply do not have anyone presenting or discussing the central issue that I have been raising about how the system furthers concentrated ownership of productive capital economic growth, while leaving the vast majority of people essentially enslaved in labor tasks exponentially being destroyed or degraded by technological innovation and invention––the result of tectonic shifts in the technologies of production and the steady off-loading of American manufacturing and jobs. Where is the media and academia who have remained silent on this pressing issue? Where are those leaders that can be supported for serving the public interest, and where is the money to mount presidential, senatorial,and congressional campaigns that won’t behold them to special interests? This is problematic!
Sadly, after a half-century, we have no leaders with a growth strategy that could restore the economic productiveness of the American economy. The growth strategy I have presented is not new, but it has not yet registered in the minds of leaderless politicians and their advisors from the left to the right of the political spectrum and a population of people who have been mis-educated and mis-led by conventional economists from all the conventional schools of economics.
WAKE-UP AMERICA!!
