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Middle-aged White Mortality has Skyrocketed (1 Viewer)

Flooded?  So the US has a population of over 318M and, what 15M illegals, have taken all the jobs and driven down wages?  Really?

How about most US born dudes don't want to pick crops, garden, or lay bricks all day everyday?
there are at least 30 million illegals, and we have massive legal immigration every year. Then there are those kids in china that work for 1 dollar a year, so all the factory jobs in USA can't fairly compete.

US born dudes would pick crops, just not at the slave wages that illegals brought it down to.

 
The Reagan ideal was that if we could globalize the economy it would drive down inflation by reducing costs of goods and services that were high labor.  This was supposed to be accompanied by an education push and technology push.  This happened, and peaked in the late 90s and led to the world we live in now to a great extent.

Problem was people didn't really see that there was an end game to that approach.  That global labor participation was going to peak and costs of goods could only get so low before the benefits of lower cost goods could not keep up with rising health and education costs.

The problem now is there are simply too many people in the world.  This is being translated as an anti immigration push, but really should be a sterilization push worldwide across all sectors and societies.  We simply don't need all the people we have now, and certainly more isn't helping matters.

 
This was supposed to be accompanied by an education push and technology push. 
This part is on individuals to accomplish. And I think it's worth noting that education doesn't need to equal college. The vocations offer steady employment opportunities, and we should completely include the training for those professions as education as much as traditional college is thought of as education. As individuals, we need to take that self-accountability, what have we done to better ourselves. Just complaining about the "illegals taking all the jobs" or whatever flavor of that idea people are spinning seems lazy, both intellectually and actually lazy in life.

 
Wait..So uneducated, lower income, white males are in the same boat as most other minorities in similar situations?  Here I was just thinking it was all about race this whole time. 

 
The Reagan ideal was that if we could globalize the economy it would drive down inflation by reducing costs of goods and services that were high labor.  This was supposed to be accompanied by an education push and technology push.  This happened, and peaked in the late 90s and led to the world we live in now to a great extent.

Problem was people didn't really see that there was an end game to that approach.  That global labor participation was going to peak and costs of goods could only get so low before the benefits of lower cost goods could not keep up with rising health and education costs.

The problem now is there are simply too many people in the world.  This is being translated as an anti immigration push, but really should be a sterilization push worldwide across all sectors and societies.  We simply don't need all the people we have now, and certainly more isn't helping matters.
War is coming

 
This is sad. I was going to make a joke about white privilege, but I don't find any of this to be funny.  People are hurting in this country and a lot of that is coming down to jobs. You can talk about how illegals are good for the economy and how globalization is good for our economy, but if the majority of people in our country aren't the ones benefiting then it doesn't matter. Economy is suppose to serve all people, not just the super rich.
There is so much wrong with this post, I don't even know where to begin.

I agree that it is sad and that there are a lot of people hurting, but it isn't anywhere near a majority and illegal immigration and globalization aren't to chiefly (or even mostly) to blame. 

An awful lot of it comes down to personal responsibility: people that don't avail themselves to educational opportunities available to them tend to fare much worse economically than those that do. Sure, not everybody wants to, or is able to, get a professional degree or even go to a four year college, but the data shows that doing something as simple as graduating from high school makes a big difference. And attending a community college or trade school (a real one, not a for-profit BS "college") makes a material difference as well. Those are goals that are within reach of most people, even if they can't afford (or don't want) to go to a four year college. Data on Earnings and Unemployment by Education Level

An interesting facet to all of this is that there are lots of unfilled job openings out there right now. In fact, unfilled job openings have plateaued at a high level for over a year, well above the levels seen for most of the past 15+ years. The persistence of this situation suggests a mismatch between the skills employers want and the skills the unemployed have (as well as geographical mismatches). This is what economists mean when they talk about a "skills gap".

The fiction that the US manufacturing sector is dying due to globalization is just that...a fiction. The US produces more value in manufactured goods now (measured by constant $ volume), than it ever has. So the US manufacturing sector is doing great from the standpoint of output, it is simply doing it with fewer workers. The lion's share of the jobs that have disappeared haven't been exported, they have been replaced by efficiency increasing technology (e.g. robots). The jobs that remain skew increasingly towards more educated and/or higher skilled-workers.

So the solution is deceptively simple in terms of a plan, even if it is difficult in practice: people need to get more educated in the skills that are in demand. That means that younger people need to graduate from high school and pursue some kind of education that gives them marketable skills. It doesn't have to be a traditional four year college degree, it could be a practical Associate's Degree or certificate program, or training in the trades. And older workers who have been left behind need job-retraining.

Not getting hooked on hard drugs, not drinking to excess, not smoking, and not becoming morbidly obese would also be helpful to lifespans and quality of life as well.

 
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This part is on individuals to accomplish. And I think it's worth noting that education doesn't need to equal college. The vocations offer steady employment opportunities, and we should completely include the training for those professions as education as much as traditional college is thought of as education. As individuals, we need to take that self-accountability, what have we done to better ourselves. Just complaining about the "illegals taking all the jobs" or whatever flavor of that idea people are spinning seems lazy, both intellectually and actually lazy in life.

More Aliens Mean A Bigger Labor Supply


You’ve heard of the law of supply and demand?  It’s a tool we use to help us understand how prices are determined in a free market.

All you need to know is that when demand goes up, prices go up (more people are bidding up the price); when supply goes up, prices go down (there’s lots to go around, so there’s no urgency); and vice versa.

This holds true when it comes to the prices of apples, oil, or a person’s labor—if there’s lots of workers who can do a job, then employers don’t have to pay as much to get a qualified employee; if there’s a shortage of workers, then employers have to pay more to hire someone.  Simple.

America’s labor market has been flooded with illegal immigrants looking for work.  This increases the supply of labor, which decreases the price employers must pay for workers (wages).

There’s no way around this logic: if you accept the law of supply and demand, then you must accept that illegal immigration decreases American wages.  End of story.


II. Migrants Undercut American Workers


Undocumented workers not only increase the labor supply, but they’re also off-the-books, meaning that they work for less than minimum wage, they don’t get benefits that citizen’s would get etc.

Basically, illegals undercut the labor market’s mandated floor, pulling the rug out from American workers—there’s no way a minimum wage worker can compete against someone working for $2 a day.  It’s not going to happen


Claim I: “Illegal Immigrants Do Jobs Americans Don’t Want To Do”



Americans are willing to work the jobs illegals do, and they currently work them in states where there aren’t illegal immigrants.  If you check out this document published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, you’ll see that there are literally millions of Americans, white, black, and Hispanic, who are employed as janitors, laborers, store clerks—everything.

It’s simply not true that Americans won’t do these jobs—they can’t, because they’re being undercut by illegal immigrants.  Meanwhile, millions of Americans are unemployed.

http://www.nationaleconomicseditorial.com/2017/03/02/why-illegal-immigration-must-be-stopped/

 
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This part is on individuals to accomplish. And I think it's worth noting that education doesn't need to equal college. The vocations offer steady employment opportunities, and we should completely include the training for those professions as education as much as traditional college is thought of as education. As individuals, we need to take that self-accountability, what have we done to better ourselves. Just complaining about the "illegals taking all the jobs" or whatever flavor of that idea people are spinning seems lazy, both intellectually and actually lazy in life.
 Putting technology in schools helped accomplish much of what we see today.  Other areas of the world that didn't make that push or waited were left behind.  For awhile.

What happened to follow up on that was in the follow-up the early success gave in to waste, now much of the technology spend is just throwing tablets at kids and praying they figure it out.  Early technology pushes were some of the best education ROI the world has ever seen.  We need to get back to that now that the hardware is really in place.

It's lazy to just throw out that people are responsible for items like this, nobody makes schools teach Spanish while it's damn near useless compared to C++ or Java.  The world is totally different now and we need to recognize that you can't expect people to be dumped out in the world with a H.S. degree and just bootstrap themselves to a 100k salary.  

What is put forward in middle/high schools needs to be re-evaluated.  It's not teaching people to set an o-ring on a toilet that will create jobs, it's people that are sufficiently skilled enough to debug a robot or maintain a control system and service jobs become the fallback, not what people that aren't "lazy" should strive for.

 
In fairness, college is the biggest racket out there.  We as a society have allowed them to turn into a massive money making scheme and attached degree prerequisites on jobs that in no way should require a degree.  So generations of kids are now building up massive debt to get the degree that will now land them in a relatively menial job that did not require a degree 20 years ago.  More people should be looking into the trades and less people going to college, but we have created such a paradigm that it is not the case.

College is OVERRATED (says the guy with two degrees who is 20 years into the IT industry doing stuff that I could teach a high school graduate to do if they had a modicum of logic).

 
there are at least 30 million illegals, and we have massive legal immigration every year. Then there are those kids in china that work for 1 dollar a year, so all the factory jobs in USA can't fairly compete.

US born dudes would pick crops, just not at the slave wages that illegals brought it down to.
Feel free to start a business paying your employees a good wage to pick crops.  

 
In fairness, college is the biggest racket out there.  We as a society have allowed them to turn into a massive money making scheme and attached degree prerequisites on jobs that in no way should require a degree.  So generations of kids are now building up massive debt to get the degree that will now land them in a relatively menial job that did not require a degree 20 years ago.  More people should be looking into the trades and less people going to college, but we have created such a paradigm that it is not the case.

College is OVERRATED (says the guy with two degrees who is 20 years into the IT industry doing stuff that I could teach a high school graduate to do if they had a modicum of logic).
Agree more kids should do trade school

 
Soon education as we know it will be obsolete. 

There will be day that any information you need to know can be downloaded directly into your brain. 

 
In the words of Louis CK, nobody's holding a candlelight vigil for guys over 50 who croak.  In fact, in the history of the world, dropping dead in your 50s is still pretty good. The average life expectancy of males in the US as recently as 1900 was 47. (I'm sure this number is partly due to child mortality).

So it could be worse. Check out the life expectancy of males in countries not as well off as ours.

 
In the words of Louis CK, nobody's holding a candlelight vigil for guys over 50 who croak.  In fact, in the history of the world, dropping dead in your 50s is still pretty good. The average life expectancy of males in the US as recently as 1900 was 47. (I'm sure this number is partly due to child mortality).

So it could be worse. Check out the life expectancy of males in countries not as well off as ours.
The entire point of this article is to say that this demographic is regressing towards 3rd world lifestyles.  For much of the same reasons.  All this while the rest of the western world has gotten better at this metric.  Maybe you didn't read the article.

 
The problem now is there are simply too many people in the world.  This is being translated as an anti immigration push, but really should be a sterilization push worldwide across all sectors and societies.  We simply don't need all the people we have now, and certainly more isn't helping matters.
:goodposting: A lot of people out there without a pot to piss in nor window to throw it out of. Those folks face a tall task of getting out of poverty and that's before they start adding kids to the mix. Those kids end up consumers of limited resources and competition for a shrinking number of unskilled jobs. Around and around it goes.

 
:goodposting: A lot of people out there without a pot to piss in nor window to throw it out of. Those folks face a tall task of getting out of poverty and that's before they start adding kids to the mix. Those kids end up consumers of limited resources and competition for a shrinking number of unskilled jobs. Around and around it goes.
The threat of nuclear war has really hurt the poverty situation.  Previously we'd just put spears in their hands and ask them to walk in a straight line till they ran into someone that wanted to kill them.  And after that we'd pay the survivors to clean up.

 
This is sad. I was going to make a joke about white privilege, but I don't find any of this to be funny.  People are hurting in this country and a lot of that is coming down to jobs. You can talk about how illegals are good for the economy and how globalization is good for our economy, but if the majority of people in our country aren't the ones benefiting then it doesn't matter. Economy is suppose to serve all people, not just the super rich.
Welcome to the game, Brah.  

 
It's probably getting to the point where Struggling White America should stop blaming the spectre of the Illegal Worker and just admit that they got lazy, fat and stopped being hungry; that they had a "good enough" life during their prime earning years and are now facing a world of uncertainity in their ramping down years.   STEP UP WHITE FOLKS! 

 
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Does picking crops usually come with a 401k? Sounds like a profitable racket, need to look into that if I ever consider a career change. 

 
Oh, lawdy, curlin' fries at Arbys

Oh, lawdy, fixin' Frigidaires

Oh, lawdy, sweepin' up at church now

Oh. lawdy, ain't nobody cares

Gotta jump down, turn around (curl some fries @ Arbys)

Take crap, file an app (fix some Frigidaires)

Haul a dump, vote for Trump (sweepin up da choich now)

Screw dat college, i gots knowledge (aint nobody cares)

Oh, lawdy....

 
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What is put forward in middle/high schools needs to be re-evaluated.  It's not teaching people to set an o-ring on a toilet that will create jobs, it's people that are sufficiently skilled enough to debug a robot or maintain a control system and service jobs become the fallback, not what people that aren't "lazy" should strive for.
Technology education is wonderful, but there are a bunch of solid careers available in the traditional trades right now. So it isn't just a matter of creating new jobs, it is a matter of finding people to fill existing and vacant jobs. Just doing that would have very beneficial economic impacts.

To use your o-ring on a toilet example, plumbing is still a pretty solid career. We are doing a remodel right now and the plumber that we are sub-contracting does very well for himself and seems to have more work than he can handle. Yes, that is anecdotal, but the shortage of people with the requisite skills and willingness to work in the trades is well-established.

 
What is interesting is that I watched this play out in family, so it's very personal to me. My dad grew up in the time when you could enter the workforce straight from high school and find yourself in a steady, good paying, union protected job. You could make a living and support a family.

However, when it started to change, he couldn't adapt. And I'd argue no one was really out there trying to help him adapt. He was laid off many times from manufacturing jobs, mostly working on very large machinery. We struggled at times. But he also always said he's too old to go back to school, and never really gave that avenue a thought. 

Growing up poor in a rural environment certainly didn't have the same risk of violence as the inner city. However, it also wasn't a picnic. I was in the free and reduced lunch program most of my childhood. My clothes came from thrift stores. We sure didn't have much, and I can remember being very young and going with my mom to pickup free groceries from the community center. Grew up in a pretty shoddy two bedroom apartment that ended up getting razed a few years after my parents moved out of it. All of those things make it more difficult to grow up feeling secure and like you fit in.

I paid my own way through college, with the help of some government grants, and it worked out for me. But I certainly can understand the feelings that some of these people have right now.

 
To use your o-ring on a toilet example, plumbing is still a pretty solid career. We are doing a remodel right now and the plumber that we are sub-contracting does very well for himself and seems to have more work than he can handle. Yes, that is anecdotal, but the shortage of people with the requisite skills and willingness to work in the trades is well-established.
Around here, a plumber with experience and that works for him/herself has no problem clearing $100,000/yr. This in an area where a new house in a good school district can be had <$200,000, gas and groceries are close to national lows, etc.

Same for HVAC professionals, home contractors, etc. By no means are the trades occupied by work-force "failures".

 
Technology education is wonderful, but there are a bunch of solid careers available in the traditional trades right now. So it isn't just a matter of creating new jobs, it is a matter of finding people to fill existing and vacant jobs. Just doing that would have very beneficial economic impacts.

To use your o-ring on a toilet example, plumbing is still a pretty solid career. We are doing a remodel right now and the plumber that we are sub-contracting does very well for himself and seems to have more work than he can handle. Yes, that is anecdotal, but the shortage of people with the requisite skills and willingness to work in the trades is well-established.
That's fine, but there's still a finite economic window for which to work in.  Increasing capacity here isn't exactly going to raise GDP, for example. 

Shoot for the stars, settle for the moon and all that.  

 
That's fine, but there's still a finite economic window for which to work in.  Increasing capacity here isn't exactly going to raise GDP, for example. 

Shoot for the stars, settle for the moon and all that.  
What do you think GDP is?

Filling job openings that can't be filled with people that can't find work definitely increases GDP.

 
What do you think GDP is?

Filling job openings that can't be filled with people that can't find work definitely increases GDP.
Contractor/repair output does not drive GDP. In fact, I would believe they would be placed in the same category of lawyers in that they would be a subtractor though tbh I'm not sure how the accounting works there.

Training people to do maintenance/install/construction type work is certainly not going to help exports, that much we can agree on.  

If the idea is to promote isolationism then trade schools has benefits.  If idea is to promote a global workforce then the way forward is technology skills.

 
Exactly right and (unfortunately) exactly what many people don't want to hear.
I think there is some framing of that. 

If you look at the globe for example. There is only so much money to be circulated.  People working harder isn't going to necessarily create equality, but it will go a long way to flattening the curve  Now obviously wealth is created in this world by taking things the environment gives you and converting into goods.  So over time by pulling oil and whatever out of the earth we create more total wealth across the globe.  Ok.  I don't think there's much disagreement there.

Problem is that you either focus efforts on getting people to achieve a certain bar in life, for today the bar appears to be a plumber.  If the goal is to have the entire able bodied workforce at or above the level of a plumber you haven't really done much to grow the wealth of the world.  You've just ensured people's backed up ####ters get unclogged quickly.  If we brought everyone up to just the tradesman standard as a minimum the world will look a heck of a lot like the communist utopia.  Everyone just works for the community, serves themselves, goes home.  Instead of 50,000 plumbers making $100k a year we now have perhaps 125,000 making $65k a year.  This benefits a few people, yes.  But have we advanced society? 

To continue the actual growth of the wealth of this world takes more than just "skilled tradesman" it takes people with true skills developed from a young age.  And saying that this takes responsibility is correct, but if you aren't providing a framework for people to either meet, or exceed the bar ultimately there's less wealth to go around for all of us.  In 1970 you didn't need a large work force of creators, but now you do.  Those creators aren't armed with plungers either.  

So when you say you want more labor participation what do you want?  More plumbers making less money? Or more people out creating wealth so we can deal with paying plumbers 100k a year?

 
This isn't surprising by any means.  There is a significant amount of angry (mostly sad) white working class people that time forgot in the USA.  They are uneducated and they are used to jobs being handed to them with no skill and no education.  That day is gone so they have turned to drinking and drugs.  The level of mental illness in this country is astounding
....and it's only going to get worse.

 
This is a big reason Democrats lost the election.  There is legitimate suffering in this class of citizens and the Dems used to be their voice.  Unfortunately they abandoned them when they went all in in identity politics.  Trump courted them and, voila.

 
Oops, unions.
This is largely ignored, but the white blue-collar rejected the very institution that protected their ways of life by buying into Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan's anti-union rhetoric and actions.  They voted for them 4 times despite that they were chipping away at their financial security.  Those seeds were planted in the Nixon era (or earlier?), then shifted gears in the 1980s and it really didn't take long to start seeing major effects.  They did a good job pitting citizen against citizen, while the corporations reaped easy profits.  While that happened industrial companies were installing their replacements - not Mexicans, but robots.  And when the time came to defend laborers, there was no organization to speak for the individual working man/woman against the organized company that employs people to figure out how to not pay you.  The Democrats, who should have helped preserve them didn't.  They turned their backs on them by the 1980s, probably because they accepted the death of unions, and Clinton performed the coup de grace on them with NAFTA.  Clinton may not have fathered Neoliberalism, but he sure ushered it into the Democrat platform and now we have neither side of this two party system looking out for blue collar workers.

 
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So instead of taking $$ to retrain as Clinton offered ( train coal miners to get newer jobs in other green energy), they #####ed. Then voted for Trump who ain't gonna do anything for them but blame immigrants. Then they go drink and drug and get depressed. And trump wants to pull their mental health benefits. Pretty much only themselves to blame I guess. 

 
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We are not all that far off from computers being able to code for themselves, hopefully all those kids we are pushing into IT are better at adapting to change than all the lazy white dudes downing their Oxy with Bud heavies. 

 
More Aliens Mean A Bigger Labor Supply


You’ve heard of the law of supply and demand?  It’s a tool we use to help us understand how prices are determined in a free market.

All you need to know is that when demand goes up, prices go up (more people are bidding up the price); when supply goes up, prices go down (there’s lots to go around, so there’s no urgency); and vice versa.

This holds true when it comes to the prices of apples, oil, or a person’s labor—if there’s lots of workers who can do a job, then employers don’t have to pay as much to get a qualified employee; if there’s a shortage of workers, then employers have to pay more to hire someone.  Simple.

America’s labor market has been flooded with illegal immigrants looking for work.  This increases the supply of labor, which decreases the price employers must pay for workers (wages).

There’s no way around this logic: if you accept the law of supply and demand, then you must accept that illegal immigration decreases American wages.  End of story.


II. Migrants Undercut American Workers


Undocumented workers not only increase the labor supply, but they’re also off-the-books, meaning that they work for less than minimum wage, they don’t get benefits that citizen’s would get etc.

Basically, illegals undercut the labor market’s mandated floor, pulling the rug out from American workers—there’s no way a minimum wage worker can compete against someone working for $2 a day.  It’s not going to happen


Claim I: “Illegal Immigrants Do Jobs Americans Don’t Want To Do”




Americans are willing to work the jobs illegals do, and they currently work them in states where there aren’t illegal immigrants.  If you check out this document published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, you’ll see that there are literally millions of Americans, white, black, and Hispanic, who are employed as janitors, laborers, store clerks—everything.

It’s simply not true that Americans won’t do these jobs—they can’t, because they’re being undercut by illegal immigrants.  Meanwhile, millions of Americans are unemployed.

http://www.nationaleconomicseditorial.com/2017/03/02/why-illegal-immigration-must-be-stopped/
Keep fighting the good fight.   :thumbup:

 

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