The “Turning Out” Of America

So when you go to buy a new car, what is the first thing the salesman asks you? It is not, “what price are you looking to buy at?” It is, “What do you want your monthly payment to be?” We will let you sign and drive today. It resembles a crack dealer giving away the first rocks. We have stopped structuring our finances around what we earn weekly, and instead started structuring it around what minimum payments we can make monthly. Making monthly payments on “happiness” is fine. That is as long as you have a job that will let you make them. The problem is what happens if you no longer have a job? I don’t care how you renegotiate that house loan. If you have no job, you aren’t going to be able to pay anything.

McCain: Those Jobs Aren’t Coming Back. “I’ve got to give you some straight
talk—I can’t turn that around,” McCain said. “I can’t look you in the eye and
tell you I believe those jobs are coming back.” (Grand Rapids Press, 4/23/08)



Well with that attitude we won’t. What he is essentially saying is that we are destined to be a third world country cleaning the toilet bowls of the emerging economies. This is the kind of talk a pimp might use to groom his latest project. “look, I love you so I am going to tell you the truth. Your future is hopeless, but IF you do a few things for me, listen to me, I can make it at least profitable. I love you.”

On one side we are given credit. We get hooked on it like a drug. We believe we need it to survive. To get the same fix we keep “needing more”. On the other side we have our own government beating us down with their “trickle down economics” that keeps us just rich enough to satisfy our fix. In the mean time we don’t notice that our good paying jobs are going over seas. The next thing we know, we are doing whatever it takes to get that American dream. Financing education, housing, transportation, food, clothing, and even insurance for the whole thing. (Insurance with is really building credit for a mishap that might happen.) This is burning the candle at both ends and in the middle. Less job s for lower income with money that we already have spent.

The credit concept works great until the time comes that we have domestic policy leaders that lead us from our upper middle class paying unskilled jobs at the Ford Plant to the unemployment line and/ or to the stocking shelves of Wal-Mart. When policies are made to allow good paying jobs to leave the US economy and enrich a poorer economy, we are then doomed to the crisis we are in now. With monthly obligations to pay for the stuff we already “bought” we “owe” our keepers. John McCain has said time and time again, he doesn’t believe that “good industrial jobs are coming back.”

Not all of us are smart enough to be doctors, lawyers, or beauty pageant queens from Alaska. Not all of us are built for high paying secure educational jobs. Some of us are fantastic at using our backs, blood, sweat, and even tears to make our salt. That doesn’t mean we deserver to work 180 hours to get the same compensation the CEO that has sold us down the river makes in 40 hours. We have factory jobs to produce electronics, plastic dishes, toys, and automobiles being done over seas. The jobs that are done here we are learning to use robots and computers to do the work of 10 men. We no longer can afford to have one parent stay home and educate the children functionally enough to succeed in higher education. At the same time everything cost so much that a weeks pay isn’t cutting it for basic and extended basic needs. IF that wasn’t bad enough, competition for the jobs and the goods has accelerated. We now have twice as many people on earth as we did when JFK was president. Now if the jobs are going away and/ or being done more efficiently ad there are more of us looking for them, how id giving up on the ones that we do have and need going to get us out of the mess? There surely must be something that we can do that is always in demand wherever there are people.

The people who tell you that “the production jobs are gone”, are trying to get you to accept a life of prostitution. Don’t believe them. Listen to anybody who says they are willing to try to keep those jobs at home.

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