The problems here are too deep to fully expand on here. Part of the problem is the jobs that do exist really don’t pay that much and have no benefits. Who wants to work at the gas station, quick mart, grocery store, Taco Bell, etc. for $12 an hour, 20 hours a week with no healthcare when they can stay home and make the same amount lying on their asses and get Medicare?
We shipped out most of the industries that actually make things and turned ourselves into a consumer society. That’s pretty much all we do now is buy stuff other countries make.
Now let’s talk about the manufacturing industries we do have, with bloated unions and administrative staff that make way too much money. The products they make are generally outside of the affordable comfort zone for most Americans. That’s why vehicles have gone to 72 month loans and higher with $700-$900 per month cost. That’s as much as a mortgage for a lot of families in rural communities. People can’t afford that so they keep what they have longer. Eventually lower sales and cost cutting leads to those plants closing down, costing thousands of jobs and with nowhere to go to apply their skills. Some go to school, some choose to remain unemployed and others go into the crappy retail and service industry that can’t support the kind of life many people want.
I think virtually all of what you say is accurate.
As occurred after 2010 when Obamacare was passed, employers with higher-paying salaries and full benefits were holding back on hiring, because they didn't know what new taxes and other corporate punishments were coming down from the Obama administration, and Obamacare obligated them to give healthcare and benefits to all full-time employees, that many medium and small businesses couldn't afford to do, and larger corporations that could provide healthcare to employees didn't want to spend the money. I worked in 2012-2013 for one of the largest corporations in my area, and they made "full time" a maximum of 32 hours, to assure they wouldn't be forced to pay for employee health insurance.
It was in the late 1990's and early 2000's that employers I worked for stopped offering health insurance as part of the package, and I noticed healthcare cost began to skyrocket. For 15-plus years up till then, my employers all provided health insurance as part of the salary offered. I took a job in 1999 with a financial company that for the first time DEDUCTED cost of healthcare from my wages, and it was a large chunk. I'd taken the job at a $7,000 raise over my previous job, but with the insurance deducted from my paycheck, I was actually earning the same takehome pay as my previous job. It was part of why I quit, I told my employer you offered "salary plus insurance", but in reality it was salary
minus insurance. And many co-workers I discussed it with over my time there said they felt similarly deceived when taking their job offers as well. Since then I've had to pay my own insurance.
You're definitely accurate that the U.S. has become a service economy, and most of the industrial jobs have been "offshored" to third world countries in China, India, the Phillipines, and the rest of Southeast Asia, and Latin America. That's a trend that began in the 1970's and 1980's and accelerated in the 1990's forward. When Donald Trump was elected, he did what was considered the impossible, legislating economic incentives to bring many of those factories and jobs back to the United States.
And we all saw the instantaneous shift back to foreign dependency as soon as Biden and the Democrats seized power in Jan 2021. It has taken them less than 11 months to destroy the surge in economic growth (the largest in over 50 years) and oil independence (for the first time in over 70 years) that were giving us back our industry, jobs growth, and rising wages under President Trump, for the first time in decades.
But for the most part I'd agree that it's both the Democrats and Republicans who have been selling us out to lobbyists and corporations and foreign governments over that last 50 years, with declining our wages and moving our jobs and factories overseas, in what Pat Buchanan in
Death of the West and his other books terms "bipartisan economic treason".
Luckily, Trump was not another establishment/RINO Republican, not part of the majority of Republicans who along with the establishment Democrats in an elite club have enriched themselves for decades feeding off the managed decline of the United States. To the detriment of the American people they were elected to represent. President Trump dragged the sellout Republicans kicking and screaming into doing the right thing for the American people, and for a few brief years, factories and jobs were seeing unprecedented growth, and wages were rising. I hope to see that return after the 2024 election.
In less than one year under Biden, wages have risen 2%, but inflation has risen almost 6%.
For those paying attention, that's roughly a 4% loss in wages, in Biden's first year.