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Since the beginning of recorded history, the vast majority of people have lived lives of desperate subsistence survival. All of the wealth of empires and eventual nations went to the powers that ran those empires. The massive wealth was always for the emperors, czars, kings and queens, dictators or whatever the leaders may have been called. In a few cases of empire, the citizens of the conquering peoples fared much better than everyone else in the known world, but still had significant limitations on wealth and property.Most people have lived by making money for the owners of the land. The result for the worker was, hopefully, to make enough to eat at relatively regular intervals, to have some sort of minimal dwelling place, and to have the most rudimentary clothes.
Most people could truly expect to come into this world with nothing and leave with nothing.
Even at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the fate of people was the same. They lived in worse conditions than their poor predecessors because they hovelled together in cities where they lived in ghetto-like conditions that were much more prone to the spread of disease and plagues than any who had come before them. This was true, not only of the British portion of the Industrial Revolution, but of the American portion as well.
Children had worked on the farms beside their parents and so it was not considered to be any different to send them off to a factory where they worked long hard hours, not for their parents, but for some unknown task master who expected them to work with very dangerous machinery or inside coal mines where the only education they ever got was to know the difference between coal and slag.
If you are a religious person, I suggest that you thank God that you were born in this time and not in any of those times. This is a unique time in history; the only time that a middle class society has developed in the true sense of the word. For the past hundred years, a growing middle class has pushed forward an economy and existence that supersedes the life-style of any of our forefathers.
During the past century, you could expect to have the opportunity to rise to a level of wealth that would allow you to own property, a home, personal property, conveniences, cars, an excess of food and even afford a somewhat leisurely life. Yes, life has never been better for the average person. We can get an education (even an advanced education is expected today), rise to middle management positions or even upper level management. We can afford to travel, play and enjoy the fruits of life.
In a way, it was the Industrialization process that made this possible. An Industrial America developed the need for managers and eventually a stable and happy work force. The ability of the work force to purchase the items they made led to an accelerating economy. Not only did we have markets abroad, but we had them at home as well. Thanks to factories and the assembly line approach to manufacturing, any person could qualify for a job if they wanted one. Things got better as time went along. Houses got bigger, cars got better, and wages continued to increase. There was actually money left over to save for the future. Retirement funds developed and the future was secured for everyone.
Sadly, we now are seeing the decline of the middle class.
During my lifetime, many of us have found that staying in the middle class has been something of a struggle. I would say that I have stayed there by “the skin of my teeth.” What has happened to bring us to the state of a shrinking middle class?
That is not a difficult question to answer. But there are many factors. Increasing inflation has been a significant factor and you can expect that problem to get much worse in the near future as trillion dollar debts come due. I like to use the example of a typical car to illustrate the inflation problem. All of the time that I have been living, the typical car cost about half a year’s salary but now with escalating prices (cars now costing on the average $30,000 and up) and declining salaries, it is common to see a car cost more than a year’s salary. Home prices escalated to amounts that the typical person could not even catch. Before I bought my present home, I tried to buy several other homes, but I could not get there fast enough to buy. Each time I tried, the cost had gone up another $30,000. Of course, we all know what a disaster that created.
But the single most destructive force behind the decline of the middle class to this point has been the loss of manufacturing jobs in America. We do not produce anything anymore. What we did produce has been outsourced all over the world to countries with cheap labor. While that may be good for the bottom line of a company in the short run, in the long run, it leaves a devastated home economy. If we cannot purchase the goods because we do not have jobs because we don’t make anything, how will the company’s profit?
Without jobs, the government assumes a more powerful role because now, they are expected to come in and fix the problem. But they attempt to fix the problem by throwing money at it. They want to assume control of your health care, your money (welfare) and eventually every aspect of life. But that sounds like the existence of all those people that lived before us; all of those people who came into this world with nothing and left with nothing.
Yes, it does, doesn’t it?
John Wayne Tucker
http://johnwaynetucker.com/congress
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