"The Hoarding of the American Dream"

[Adam]

...are people still arguing that a white person's success is literally at the expense of a minority's?

Yes because America loves to root for the underdog.

[Adam]

Related?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfgSEwjAeno
Oliver doesn't have a clear point in this one, more of a narrative of facts and observations.

[Adam]

Small I and no debt is everything.

Yes, but large I and no debt will get you there too, albeit a little later. Its all about making good financial decisions. Granted I didn't figure this out until I was maybe 28, so I'm hardly the spokesman for good-financial-decisions-can-be-leveraged-to-get-ahead-in-life (whatever that means) quarterly.

[kevm14]

Relevant:
http://www.msn.com/en-us/money/savingan ... &ocid=iehp

Most people in the U.S. are living in financially precarious circumstances. Half of all Americans have nothing put away for retirement and the vast majority of them have under $1,000 saved, total.

According to a 2016 GOBankingRates survey, 35 percent of all adults in the U.S. have only several hundred dollars in their savings accounts and 34 percent have zero. Only 15 percent have over $10,000 stashed away.

So by a different standard, we are still in the top 20%, even 15%. Probably closer to 10% in some cases.

Then there's this whole deal:

For contrast, here's how much experts say you should have saved at every age:

In your 20s: Aim to save 25 percent of your overall gross pay

By age 30: Have the equivalent of your annual salary saved

By age 35: Have twice your annual salary saved.

By age 40: Have three times your annual salary saved.

By age 45: Have four times your annual salary saved.

By age 50: Have five times your annual salary saved.

If they mean cash savings + retirement, this isn't that exciting. If it is just cash on hand, well, that's asking a whole lot.

So what does this all mean? It means that we are doing very well compared to most other people. And I'd also offer that inflation on education and other consumer goods has been enabled by the easy access to credit, some of which the government actually directly influenced.

Credit makes the world go 'round but you'd see less price inflation on things if it wasn't so easy to borrow money. Housing market would be less. And if interest rates were higher, the stock market probably wouldn't be as insane as it has been for better or for worse.

Basically, the prices of things like $700 cell phones would seem properly outrageous if their cost wasn't buried in "affordable" monthly payments - just as an example. Another good example would be that the average price of a new vehicle would likely be less if it wasn't so common to have longer term loans, leases and the like. Or, by the way, really low rates, including on USED cars.

I am not advocating for an all-cash society - I like credit cards though never carry an unpaid balance. It says a lot that regular people think they are being a good consumer by knowing which cards they can move balances to and how long the no interest grace periods are. Barring a medical emergency, why do you have that debt in the first place????

[Adam]

Barring a medical emergency, why do you have that debt in the first place????

I really wanted <thing>! Then before <thing> was broken or completely unusable (and before I paid off the charge for <thing>, I decided to get <thing2>.

[bill25]

I need to find the links but I have read a few articles that basically all say that things can't sustain the trends. Bubbles will burst. The house prices are going way up again, student loans are continuing to rise, and companies can't maintain "living wages". You can argue all day whether it is a company's job to pay living wages, but the bottom line is that there needs to be enough "living wage" for the economy to work.

There are 2 ways for people to make enough money to live. Salary amount, or lowered cost of living. This isn't brain surgery, it is basic math.

More basic math. If the trend continues and the "Living wage" is 30 to 40 dollars an hour due to inflation and costs, most companies will go out of business because they can't afford to pay that. Automation is also part of the job problem.

We really need to figure out what happens when computers and machines take over most jobs.

[Bob]

We really need to figure out what happens when computers and machines take over most jobs.

Then we can all just kick back and live in utopia while the computers and robots do all the work. In all seriousness, automation is the big threat to jobs that no one seems to want to talk about. It's easier for politicians to blame Mexico or China than it is for them to admit that a large portion of our workforce is poorly suited for the jobs that are will be available in the future when all the low skill jobs are automated.

[kevm14]

The capitalist solution would be to devise a plan to cost-effectively incentivise people not just to work, but to learn new things and be somewhat flexible to changing market demands. The argument would be in exactly how to do that, and exactly how much money to spend doing it. General left-ish opinions and policies tend towards "it is not your fault, your issues are a failure of the system." And general right-ish opinions and policies tend towards "if you want to make your own bad decisions, you can live with the consequences." At least this is my observation. Theoretically the democratic process would optimize for the best of both worlds. But that is not what we have.

Some facts:
- some people are more motivated than others
- some people make better decisions than others
- some people have greater intelligence than others

[bill25]

I think the automation problem is worse than people being re-educated.

If there are x number of people that are of workforce age, and x-y jobs available, what is retraining going to do? This is what experts are talking about. If there is a deficit of jobs (in the millions) how do we proceed as a society. People can't get paid for work that isn't there. Yes, some entrepreneurs will make some new work, but not likely at the scale required.

According to Google:
There are approximately 3.5 million professional truck drivers in the United States, according to estimates by the American Trucking Association.
As of 2012, in the United States: the total number of taxi cab drivers is 233,900;
Delivery Truck Drivers and Driver/Sales Workers, 2014 1,330,000

According to the one answer from Quora:
Here’s one source (of unknown quality) that says there are 3.5 million truck drivers in the U.S.: Truck Drivers in the USA

And this source says:
•2.4 million truck drivers — 1.6 million truck drivers + 800,000 delivery operators.
•180,000 taxi drivers, 160,000 Uber drivers, 500,000 school bus drivers, and 160,000 transit bus drivers — another 1 million jobs.

US labor force is about 62%, population is: 321 million
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_for ... ted_States

so 62% of 321 million is 192 million

Call the drivers above as 4 million as a gross average, that is a loss of 2% of the workforce due to car/truck automation. I am not even sure that is really all of the drivers accounted for either because it didn't specify if that included mail carriers, UPS Fed-Ex etc.

Also take into account that the population is growing, so even if the job number was constant as opposed to decreasing, there still wouldn't be enough jobs.

I don't think the driver industry is the only industry poised to lose workers...

[kevm14]

If there are x number of people that are of workforce age, and x-y jobs available, what is retraining going to do? This is what experts are talking about. If there is a deficit of jobs (in the millions) how do we proceed as a society. People can't get paid for work that isn't there. Yes, some entrepreneurs will make some new work, but not likely at the scale required.

Historically these problems generally sort themselves out, though I don't mean without intervention - they are dealt with. Automation and its effect on labor has been around for hundreds of years through the Industrial Revolution. I guess I'd have to dig in and see how we handled each transition and how long it took. But you could also replace "automation" with "globalization" and the effect is the same. Perhaps more threatening to us, there is an increasing trend to outsource not just labor and manufacturing, but skilled white collar work. Ultimately though if you make consumer goods, you won't have a very good business if most people cannot afford to buy your products. Perhaps we react and treat the symptoms rather than pulling the bandaid off, which does a greater disservice in the long run. Can't afford to go to college? Here are some loans! Who cares what the degree is! Similarly, I recall a statistic that some alarming percentage of Americans couldn't afford a sudden $400 emergency expense. How many of them have a modern smartphone? If the 0.1% is really hoarding all the money, who is paying for all these goods and services that most people seem to enjoy? But I digress...

Manufacturing may be still disappearing due to globalization and automation, but there is seemingly plenty of demand for other trades. Mainly because we've been insisting that Jimmy and Susie high school graduates would still be better off with that fine arts degree and a load of debt, than possibly picking up a yucky wrench. It is not one for one and the answer isn't binary. The answer is always a balance. And the bottom line is, if the gov't wants to be in the incentive policy business, they should incentivise according to the nation's need. But really it would be better if people just helped other people make better decisions - in 2017 it is not hard, AT ALL, to figure out where the demand is, what the pay is, what the education/training costs, etc. This was available for us, but nowhere near as effortlessly as today.

Trades are the answer because service is really best handled domestically. Unless China is going to put a bunch of plumbers on a boat and ship them over here to help put up a new building, and then go back when the work is finished. Or build an entire building and ship THAT over. But seriously, plumbing, electrical, carpentry, masonry, painting, construction in general (this list goes on and on, like paving- can't ship a driveway or road!), HVAC, demolition, car mechanic, heavy truck mechanic, heavy equipment mechanic, boat mechanic, line worker, etc. We are still going to build stuff domestically. Maybe less, but you'll still need welders for repairs, for example. And I didn't even mention the DoD and its large contribution to American skilled labor, including some very highly specialized stuff.

Or I could have just looked up this list: https://www.theworkingcentre.org/types-trades/393

I am not saying they are all at 0% risk of being taken over by automation or even globalization, but they are not at risk like manufacturing and truck driving/taxi operators.

Germany has figured it out, by the way.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... -education
http://www.npr.org/2012/04/04/149927290 ... employment
http://www.make-it-in-germany.com/en/fo ... es-it-work

https://www.forbes.com/sites/emsi/2013/ ... 06df526397

Those are just the national figures; in Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Jersey and New Hampshire, more than 60 percent of the skilled-trades labor force is 45 or older. Other Northeastern states such as Delaware, Maine and New York also have aging skilled-trades workforces, as do Illinois, Ohio and Pennsylvania. (See all states in this spreadsheet.)

Graduating with a bullshit degree in the northeast in debt and with no job, and complaining about it? You fail, because there is a HUGE skilled trades gap. Yeah we could coddle and say the high school failed, and the gov't failed or even the parents failed. Sure, fine, whatever. But this is real.

Mike Rowe is doing a lot of work to fix this:
http://www.lstaff.com/2017/01/06/mike-r ... kills-gap/

It could be a fisherman, or a plumber, or a carpenter, or an HVAC tech – but we need them all and the fact is we aren’t getting enough of them. College may be all the rage, but a Gallup poll suggests that only 14 percent of Americans, and 11 percent of business leaders, actually believe that college prepares students for workplace success. Contrast this with the 96 percent of college chief academics officers who are absolutely sure they are adequately preparing students for life in the big bad world, and you’ll begin to see the problem.

That sure is a big disconnect. Thanks academic elites.

http://blog.acton.org/archives/61878-mi ... rizes.html

As Rowe explains:

College needed a PR campaign in the mid 70s. It did. We needed more people to actively use their brain. But like all PR campaigns, it went too far, and we started promoting college at the expense of all those vocations I mentioned that my grandpop did. And suddenly, those things become vocational consolation prizes.

http://profoundlydisconnected.com/foundation/

About the Foundation
The mikeroweWORKS Foundation is a 501(c)(3) public charity that rewards people with a passion to get trained for skilled jobs that actually exist. As CEO of the Foundation, Mike Rowe spends a significant amount of time speaking about the country’s dysfunctional relationship with work, highlighting the widening skills gap, and challenging the persistent belief that a four-year degree is automatically the best path for the most people.

I don't know why so many Americans are still blind to this.

Guess what happens to the price of that 4 year degree if we embrace this? It comes down, due to a simple economic principle called supply and demand.

As for that 4-year degree?

“It’s either worth it or its not,” Rowe said. “You either can afford it or you cant. And we’re either helping to subsidize it or we aren’t. Well we are. I feel like we ought to have a conversation about – forgive me, I know this rankles people – but its a return on our investment. That 1.3 trillion dollars is not falling out of the air.”