Less than 9% of the workforce is unionized, so blaming them is ridiculous–all you did was swallow Republican kool-aid.

There is almost no manufacturing left in this country, so decent jobs for high school grads are gone. You need a college degree or specialized technical training and that costs more money than kids have–because, after all, their parents aren’t earning a living wage. Pell grants helped, but those are being cut (mostly by Republicans).

And lest you think I despise only Republicans, I hate Democrats too. They are spineless sell-outs and we have a Congress that not only doesn’t give a rat’s ass for people, it doesn’t care about the country either. We need to throw out most of them and change the campaign laws–starting with Citizens United. After all, if corporations were people, we’d be putting them on trial for theft and murder.

I wish the comments here were more expressive of innovative efforts occuring in people’s communities, ways in which communities were learning to work together effectively; ways in which children were being educated independently of the public and parochial schools; ways in which people were learning to improve their healthcare through better nutrition; ways in which human and economic resources were being leveraged for better advantage.

There are simple economic principles that can be applied. If a dollar is recirculated within a community three or four times the multiplier effect is huge. When one spends a dollar in a chain store (Wlamart, for example) that dollar disappears from the community. But when that dollar in spent in a local business, that local business recirculates that dollr to another local supplier, and so on. That magnifies the limited resources a community has. If people learned to work more effectively as teams, whether to puruse educational or business ventures, the impact would be huge. But instead, we seem to want someone else to initiate policies that will return us to the prosperity of the past, and it just isn’t going to happen.

Your comment “We make very little here in the states” is wildly inaccurate.

Depending on whose study you believe, the US is the world’s number 1 or 2 manufacturer. The loss of manufacturing jobs has a lot to do with improvements in productivity which allows us to turn out more goods with fewer workers.

I did a study of couple of years ago looking at long term household income data published by the US Census and it shows the middle and lower income groups have faired pretty well over the last 40 or so years.

The data shows the numbers of the middle and lower income households have gotten smaller and the numbers of the higher income households has grown over the same timeframe.

In 1967 31% of families were in the lower income group, by 2007, families in the lower income group had fallen to less that 25% of the total. the percentage of middle income households also dropped over this time period. in 1967, less than 6% of households were in the upper income group, by 2007, 20% of households were.

Ive not been back to their site to see more recent data, but the data will probably show a short term reversal, but the longer term view (the better lens to view and make judgements) is showing a steady improvement

Do not sell something and then pocket the money — and run to the Pentagon with the name of another country to invade! Theft is theft is theft. Pay up the benefits or refund what was charged for them. Simple. When we say we cannot “afford” to pay social benefits, notice that none of those scammers are willing to stop charging for them — i.e. cancel all FICA and Unemployment taxes. After all, that is how they funded these non-stop wars in Asia and how they bought us so many “allies” in the Middle East.