On September 1, 2013, Labor Day, Parade published this statement by Robert Reich:
American manufacturing isn’t “back,” exactly. Rather it’s undergone a transformation. The vast assembly operations of the past have given way to high-tech, precision manufacturing [productive capital instruments], producing sophisticated components like aircraft parts, medical devices, and lab testing equipment.
The good news: This overhaul has increased demand for higher-paid, skilled workers––manufacturing engineers who design and improve high-tech machinery and the systems linking it together [productive capital instruments]; process specialists who oversee operations and improve their efficiency; and technicians who install, monitor, repair, and upgrade the advanced equipment.
Our challenge now is to produce more workers who have these skills. Employers are often reluctant to invest in technical training, fearing workers will cash in on their skills at another company. Workers typically can’t afford to finance their own training, and the classes offered by technical schools and community colleges are often obsolete, the victim of budge cutbacks.
Thee is, however, a possibility for a win-win outcome. More than 12 million students are projected to drop out of high school over the next decade; the millions more with diplomas face bleak job prospects. Many young people (and their parents) still assume that the only gateway to good jobs is a four-year college education. But we can learn from Germany, a world leader in technical training, and offer two-year degrees in manufacturing technology, starting the last yar of high school and extending a year beyond. This education reconfiguration could solve two problems at once––and strengthen the economy.
Of course if we seek to eliminate human toil jobs by substituting non-humans means of production for human means, the reality is that private sector job creation in numbers that match the pool of people willing and able to work will constantly be eroded by physical productive capital’s ever increasing role.
Given the current invisible structure of the economy, except for a relative few, the majority of the population, no matter how well educated, will not be able to find a job that pays sufficient wages or salaries to support a family or prevent a lifestyle, which is gradually being crippled by near poverty or poverty earnings. Thus, education is not the panacea, though it is critical for our future societal development. And younger, as well as older people, will increasingly find it harder and harder to secure a well-paying job––for most, their ONLY source of income––and will find themselves dependent on taxpayer-supported government welfare, open and disguised or concealed.
Robert Reich, while pointing to measures that will benefit “educated” Americans, fails to address the necessity for broadened private sector individual ownership of FUTURE productive capital asset economic growth, connecting people with individual Capital Homestead Accounts (CHPs) by which to build viable, sustainable diversified ownership portfolios in America’s corporations and future corporations, and to provide financial security in retirement.
See “Education Is Critical To Our Future Societal Development” at http://www.nationofchange.org/education-critical-our-future-societal-development-1373556479
See “Financing Economic Growth With ‘FUTURE SAVINGS’: Solutions To Protect America From Economic Decline” at NationOfChange.orghttp://www.nationofchange.org/
