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Is the “Great Restructuring” Killing Our Middle Class?

By: Brad Jackson (Diary)  |  November 15th, 2011 at 10:00 AM  | 

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech are joined by Francis Cianfrocca to discuss a new push to politically unite Europe to save the Eurozone, how the restructuring of the American job market may permanently kill America’s middle class, and the disappearance of “Made in America.”

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

Related Links:

Why debt crisis could lead to a United States of Europe
What If Middle-Class Jobs Disappear?
Manufacturing America’s New Middle Class: Henry R. Nothhaft
Unemployment’s here to stay
Graph: Total unemployed, plus all marginally attached workers plus total employed part time for economic reasons (U6RATE)
Chance of 2012 U.S. recession tops 50 percent: Fed paper
Coffee & Markets: Are We Witnessing the Death of America’s Middle Class?

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  • Death_of_the_Donkey

    While technology and the “restructuring” of our workforce are somewhat inevitable, the pace could have been slowed dramatically had we insisted that China actually operate in a free market (ie currency) in order to gain PNTR status (ie free trade). Since we entered into PNTR with China we have seen a loss of 5 million manufacturing jobs and while some are surely from technology, many were not. I can almost guarantee that President Reagan would have never allowed our economy to be compromised by China since we have direct evidence that he stopped Japan from doing similar things (the VER, Harley-Davidson, semi-conductors, etc). And I am not entirely sure that measures against China would ultimately raise costs on things here by a larger amount than national income might increase from such a move.

  • conservativeparrothead

    To me this is also a society issue, as someone in education who has taught high school and junior high over the last 8 years there is no “middle class” in education, its a dying breed.

    Meaning that, the grade I am least likely to give these days is a “C”. Students are either well motivated and learning, they get A’s and B’s or they are completely unmotivated, dont do work, dont use time well, and worst of all they dont learn.

    I know many kids who I grew up with, even those times where we werent getting an A or a B, maybe it was a C we were learning, we were learning academic skills that would serve us well whenever we decided to get motivated, These days, its haves and have-nots and I think we are seeing that in the workforce. I grew up in Silicon Valley, the neighborhood I lived in when my parents moved there in the late 1970′s sold for 100,000 and it was filled with “middle-class” families: Cops, teachers, city-workers, construction workers, sheetmetal manufacturers, shipping-receiving managers – and none of them that I knew had college educations, but they were all intelligent and capable of working had and it paid off. Today, that is a dying breed and so is work-ethic. This idea that “illegals are doing jobs Americans wont do” – is existent because we allow them to choose what work they dont want to do, when in reality, those jobs are maybe all they are qualified for.

    Very scary times…and dont get me started where Academics feels the problem is.

  • jaykali

    We understand intuitively that society evolves, adapts to new technology, etc – we are going through continual change. Nobody would disagree with that. And yet we have trouble adapting to the consequences of this change, which is reorganization, old jobs are shed, new jobs are formed, etc. For individuals this can be particularly challenging, they become an expert in a skill or set of skills and find that they can earn a living using those skills. Then at some point the demand for that skill diminishes and so they are left with having to adapt to something else.

    This is where people get frustrated and want government to bail them out and protect their job. I think this is an overreach of govt and we should not assign govt the task of ‘protecting jobs’. I think they should be tasked with creating an environment for job creation. Unfortunately this sets up a political argument, where a candidate says ‘ya I’ll protect your job and this guy will protect your boss’s stock options’ – who are you going to pick?

    Unfortunately govt can only delay this for so long, eventually the jobs are lost. The productive members of society retrain and adapt, the ones who can’t adapt are left with inferior jobs or govt assistance, etc. What’s a bit heartbreaking is that eventually alot of people lose productivity for the simple fact that they age and that many careers are slanted towards the young and so through no fault of their own, older people are left behind. All you can do in that scenario is plan for the future when you’re younger which people do not do enough of.

    And so we are in a restructuring as we speak. I don’t think it’s the ‘fault’ of greedy companies, I think people are going to have to spend more time getting educated and getting the ‘right’ kind of education. If you are a young person and you devote yourselfs to getting a master in engineering you are going to better prepared than someone who gets an undergraduate degree in ‘exercise science’, sorry that’s the way it is. We need a more educated workforce. I think there’s room for education reform, sadly it turns into an argument for throwing more money at education which hasn’t gotten us anywhere.