The Cathedral has benefited greatly from this dynamic. People employed by Cathedral organizations have gotten more money, power, and social status over the last 40 years, while the working class has stagnated or shrunk towards poverty. Interestingly, the Cathedral has offered an out to the working class, one that has simply reinforced the dynamic of an ascendent Cathedral and a sinking middle class:
It’s worth noting, along these same lines, that every remedy that’s been offered to the wage class by the salary class has benefited the salary class at the expense of the wage class. Consider the loud claims of the last couple of decades that people left unemployed by the disappearance of wage-paying jobs could get back on board the bandwagon of prosperity by going to college and getting job training. That didn’t work out well for the people who signed up for the student loans and took the classes—getting job training, after all, isn’t particularly helpful if the jobs for which you’re being trained don’t exist, and so a great many former wage earners finished their college careers with no better job prospects than they had before, and hundreds of thousands of dollars of student loan debt burdening them into the bargain. For the banks and colleges that pushed the loans and taught the classes, though, these programs were a cash cow of impressive scale, and the people who work for banks and colleges are mostly salary class.Donald Trump ran on this issue - the resentment of the formerly middle class and now increasingly immiserated - and suddenly it looks like his enconomy is reversing the dynamic:
Blue-collar jobs are growing at their fastest rate in more than 30 years, helping fuel a hiring boom in many small towns and rural areas that are strong supporters of President Trump ahead of November's midterm elections.
Jobs in goods-producing industries — mining, construction and manufacturing — grew 3.3 percent in the year preceding July, the best rate since 1984, according to a Washington Post analysis.
Blue-collar jobs, long a small and shrinking part of the U.S. economy, are now growing at a faster clip than those in the nation's much larger service economy. Many factors collided to produce the blue-collar boom. Some are linked to short-term boom-and-bust cycles, but others may endure.
The rapid hiring in blue-collar sectors is delivering benefits to areas that turned out heavily for Trump in the 2016 election, according to the Brookings Institution, a shift from earlier in this expansion, when large and midsize cities experienced most of the gains.And this will be particularly galling to the Cathedral types:
Rural employment grew at an annualized rate of 5.1 percent in the first quarter. Smaller metro areas grew 5 percent. That's significantly larger than the 4.1 percent growth seen in large urban areas that recovered earlier from the Great Recession, according to an analysis by the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program of a separate set of Labor Department data released Wednesday.No wonder the Cathedral hates Trump with the fires of a thousand suns. Why would a young person go into debt (hello, Banksters!) to go to College (hello, leftie Professors and Deptartment of Education!) when he can get a good paying blue collar job? What happens to the money, power, and status for Cathedral employees when high school graduates can start making decent money in traditional blue collar professions? What happens to the Coastal Cities without a continual influx of people from the Heartland who no longer have to move to expensive and highly regulated Blue cities?
The money, power, and status enjoyed by the Cathedral is under threat by Trump's reforms. Of course they hate him.
Hat tip: Legal Insurrection.
The smart lefties are catching on. I think even Michael Moore was saying that the Donks failed the working man, and until they made amends they were toast.
ReplyDeleteThe Cathedral must truly hate people like Mike Rowe and his tradesman movement.
ReplyDeleteI know I got a shocked but interested look when I recommended some cashier go to welding or HVAC school in order to have a job that would actually pay off her Masters in Opera Singing (seriously, WTheck?)(she was lamenting that it would take forever to pay off her debts, so thus me overhearing her lament.) She wasn't interested until starting salary of $50k or more was mentioned. A few others in the surrounding area got some contemplative looks.
This was at a crafts store, by the way.
Of course Mike Rowe was an opera singer for a while. If I remember the story right he had no training or qualifications he just showed up and brazened his way through. Oh, he also has a great sounding voice and looks a bit like a Viking but going to college won't give you either of those things.
ReplyDeleteTW
Moore is from Dearborn, I believe. He's right about this.
ReplyDeleteBeans, there's a whole lot of social status signaling involved here. I'm not sure why an Opera singer would be considered higher status than a welder (probably because rich people go to the Opera) but most education systems hammer this into their students for 12 years. There's a lot of de-programming that's needed by a whole lot of kids graduating from High School. And ignore the trillion dollars of education debt and what that implies for education system incentives ...
Tim, forming a garage band with your buddies and actually playing gigs will give more life experience than a lot of 4 year degrees.
I met her again, buying the thing my wife wanted not the thing she sent me to get the first time, and she already had looked up the local welding instructors. She had thought about it and really decided a fall-back career might be pretty good. Especially when she found that pipe-line welders that can fit in small places make serious cake. Much much more than a 3rd tier singer.
ReplyDeleteSpreading the love, one person at a time.
Social class thingy is due to the dirtier your hands are, the lower on the scale one is. It's why chefs will always be below actors below singers below politicians, rather than the other way around. That's what happens when leftists can make the social status structure.
Yup, America needs a bunch of rebuilding, and it's going to take Tradesmen to do it.
ReplyDeleteI noticed a shift a few years ago, where parents were encouraging their children to at least look into trade schools, or vocational programs at the local Community College. Some of the young people I met back in Kalifornia had no idea they could make $50k~$75k doing trades jobs.