We have a problem in the US. The bottom end of the middle class is dropping out. The traditional working-class stiffs are taking on the chin, and hard. The party that I spent a lifetime supporting has lost its way. It no longer is willing to admit there is a problem, much less take an active stance to solve it. Democrats are taking the place of the GOP as the party of Big Business. It is no accident that the Trump and Sanders campaigns have made such an impact, and that they are both occurring simultaneously. Both of these movements are the end result of massive failure of the establishments of both parties - and even though they may not have the exact same approach to a solution, they at least both recognize the fact that there is a critical failure. For the party bigwigs, it is most of all it is a cognitive failure - the lower middle class is invisible to them, and they are not listening. Take a little walk down memory lane and see how this has developed over time. The Great Disconnect took shape in the early seventies, and it's quite startling in its suddenness: Breaking it down further, we see the epicenter of this decline is the male wage earner - a typical Trump supporter: The hits go on and on. The figures explain the disquiet among the typical Sanders supporters, as well: It is a well studied phenomenon that college graduates who start their careers late, or at lower-paying jobs, never fully recover - even over a lifetime of earnings. Other structural changes have aggravated the economic position of workers beyond narrow wage effects: The missing health coverage typically comes out of workers' own pockets. In fact, this has been mandated into law by our wonderful 'socialist' President. There is a similar graph for the decline in company pension benefits, but I won't bore you with the chart. The bottom line is a marked decline in the current and future prospects for both blue collar workers, and for recent college graduates. There you have the birth of the Trump and Sanders phenomena, in a nutshell.
A big piece of this is due to immigration, though the left-wing (and some on the right) refuse to acknowledge this. Blue collar trades that used to allow a man to have a middle class lifestyle with a stay at home wife taking care of 2-3 kids is now undercut by 3rd world Mexicans standing outside a Home Depot. Roofing, tiling, carpentry, paving, drywalling, masonry, and many, many other skills are now devalued to the point of subsistence wages since, as economics shows, when you greatly increase the supply of something (i.e, increase the labor market substantially), the demand goes down, which causes wages to go down accordingly. And, on the other end of the scale, our highly technical advanced jobs, like computer programming, engineering, chemistry, etc are being filled by Chinese, Indian, and Middle Eastern immigrants here on work visas. In the middle, our manufacturing base has all but disappeared. What we have left is an economy where more and more of the population works 29 hours a week (to avoid Obamacare mandates) and serves food to each other.
Couple that with the decline of unionization, also accelerated by trickle down policies: But, in my opinion, one of the big factors was the advent of the credit card, around the same time the big divide in wages and productivity started: What happened was that, essentially, wages were replaced by consumer credit to sustain living standards. That's why the economy hit such a roadblock in 2008, because consumer credit contracted for the first time since its creation. Can't have that in the debt-based economy, consumers have to be faithful in giving all their hard work's earnings to the money handlers. Finally, I agree that the Democrats, historically the party of the average guy, have done little to prevent all these destructive changes. Thanks to money in politics.
with foreign outsourcing, you haven't seen anything yet... it's gonna get worse before it gets better... much worse
4 First of all, you assume that blue collar whites only work in construction trades, as that is the entirity of your post. Your assertions about who has tech jobs is almost certainly equally without basis in fact. Provide facts and figures to support the obvious stereotypes that form the core of your "analysis", and accompany that with figures on the imaginary wave of immigration that the far right and flat earth types are always talking about.
