I materially agree with Maria Flynn’s post at RealClearPolicy. Here’s its conclusion:
Building back stronger demands that we acknowledge that our public education and workforce systems have been fighting today’s battles with inadequate resources, but we must also ask critical questions about how and whether their challenges are compounded by an aging policy infrastructure. We must consider how our rapid transition to a digital economy presents not just unimaginable challenges — but limitless opportunity.
It’s not just our public education and workforce systems that have this problem. It’s every single system we have in place from health care to financial to legal. There are too many people making too much money in all of them for them to allow them to be changed without a fight. I’m guessing that in four years or eight years we will be able to make the same complaint.
Fortunately or misfortunately as you would have it while history doesn’t repeat itself it does rhyme. The problem that our system of public education was created to address back at the turn of the last century is more of a problem today than at any point in the intervening century. Restoring it to its roots would actually help to correct that but it’s hard for me to imagine that taking place.
As for our workforce systems I suspect I see them differently than Ms. Flynn does. IMO our labor strategy has had as its primary objective maximizing the number of minimum wage jobs while our educational system has had as its objective minimizing the number of people who can afford to work for minimum wage. See a mismatch there? The “automating moment” provided by the COVID-19 pandemic has eroded many of those minimum wage jobs. Is it actually possible to restore them? Is it in our national interest to do so? And what will all of the people who can’t earn more than miminum wage do? Maybe the skyrocketing homicide rates seen in many cities during 2020 provides a hint.
We are spending way too much money on both education and health. Spending in both areas could be cut drastically. The usual comparisons with Europe suggest a 50% cut is in order.
As to what our labor policy is, if there even is one, is unknown. But (1) pushing large numbers of women into the work force, (2) opening our borders to immigration (legal and illegal), (3) pushing automation, (4) selling off our manufacturing sector to foreign companies (esp. China), and (5) allowing free trade (esp. in manufacturing) all either radically increase the labor supply or work to decrease demand for labor. And the result has been a large reduction in working class incomes since 1965.
Free trade and open borders push all wages and all prices everywhere towards the World averages. That in fact has happened to the US and even the protectionist EU. US average (all income groups) wages are something like $30,000 to $40,000 per year, and World average wage (again everyone) is something like $10,000 to $20,000 per year. So we can expect a further 50% (or more) reduction in US wages under current trade and immigration policies.
Of course, the opposite happens in poor countries. Chinese workers have benefited immensely under our current policies.
Again, the Ruling Class has reaped all the economic growth since 1965, and they have clawed income away from the working class. Middle class incomes have stagnated.
PS. A minimum wage of $15 per hour is an annual salary of $30,000 per year (15x40x50). Since there is very substantial downward pressure on that annual income, the proposed minimum wage will cause very high unemployment among the working class.
Basic economics tells you that if you constrain the supply of something and increase the willingness to pay prices will increase. That’s exactly what has happened in both education and health care. The only ways to fix that are to
We haven’t been willing to do any of those.
It’s also an effective subsidy for the underground economy.
I think possibly because of the demographics of the commenters on Dave’s blog, we see the American economy and income distribution as an aberration, when in reality we compare it to the unusual economy of the post WWII years.
Without labor unions, which many consider unfair, extreme wealth and extreme poverty appear to be the natural and normal condition of people living under unfettered capitalism.
I don’t know if that’s the best we can do while retaining the freedoms we have, which includes the freedom to be profligate and fail .
BIMO, public schools, if the unions won’t allow charter, need to focus on the daily budget and responsibilities adults will face when out of school since the government has decided to replace the nuclear family with government programs that’s the only place kids will learn to stay out of poverty.
We haven’t had “unfettered capitalism” in this country for over a century. I’m old but I’m not that old. Meanwhile, wages for ordinary people in this country rose since we started being a country until more than 30 years ago. They started increasing again from 2014 through 2019.
Maybe the reason wages flattened out several decades ago was the collapse of unions but I think that was the effect rather than the cause. IMO the simplest explanations are immigration and globalization.
“IMO our labor strategy has had as its primary objective maximizing the number of minimum wage jobs while our educational system has had as its objective minimizing the number of people who can afford to work for minimum wage.”
Labor strategy? I think that description gives it the undeserved patina of planning and thought. IMO the increasing number of minimum wage jobs actually a result, and derives primarily from trade policy which drives the services to manufacturing mix the wrong way. Its not a labor strategy first. Service industries come in many forms and levels of required skills. However, with the dominance of retail/hospitality/entertainment (servers/hosts/clerks/maids/counter people/low level sales/cashiers etc etc) it is inevitable that the attendant low value add equals low wages.
Filling those jobs requires willy nilly immigration policy, especially in light of the misguided college-for-all/subsidized college for all money trough feeding the political/education complex .
And now we are are installing a president who thinks this is all just fine.
Yes, union’s refusal to to accept wage and benefit concessions cause companies to scour the planet for lower wage workers. Plants closed, here in town Goodyear rubber among them.
But trade policy allowed this because of unfettered capitalist money influence, just as now the Biden Administration is being courted by the FAANGS.
Consider this, the Federal minimum wage in the US is $7.25/hr.
In American Samoa, where Nancy Pelosi makes money at Starkist Tuna the minimum wage is $5.56/hr. in an industry that “shall include the canning, freezing, preserving, and other processing of any kind of fish”.
Her retort to questions concerning fairness was that the wages in Thailand are 29 Cents/hr., would you prefer we move there?
I am not a Communist, but neither are the Germans, and they protect their middle class through trade unions.
There are many differences between Germany and the U. S. , the most important being social cohesion. The Germans trust their institutions—the government, trade unions, etc.—more than we do and for good reason. Our institutions are corrupt. Corruption is the business plan for most politicians and for many union officials.
Federal and state governments didn’t destroy the unions. They self-destructed. They could have gone on strike to prevent offshore outsourcing. They didn’t. They had other priorities.
Put their money and faith in the Democratic party you mean.