Reply to If you were POTUS, how would you fix the Rust Belt?

Forum Index » Political Discussion

Reply to "If you were POTUS, how would you fix the Rust Belt?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
In terms of cities, jobs need to be encouraged in high-paying growth areas such as IT, finance, and health care. And the city centers need to be attractive to younger people and young families. That means access to good, reliable public transit, access to amenities, walkable, liveable communities, good public schools and/or reputable charter/private schools that actually provide a good education and aren't fly-by-night profit factories, and reducing crime. Gentrification, basically. There are plenty of smart, younger people in these areas. If good jobs are there, they will stay and not permanently move away after college. The laid-off 50 year old former factory worker can benefit from re-training programs, and tax breaks to encourage skilled manufacturing jobs as well. But all those problems are mostly solved at the state and local level - not sure what the federal government could do there other than provide some funding. 
[/quote]

See, I'm not sure the logic holds up for these arguments.  IT is currently highly-paid, so there is room for more people to work in the industry...but at some point, it's a service job that needs to serve other activities.  What are those activities going to be?  How many more dating apps does the world really need?  Similarly, finance needs to finance something.  It's least dangerous when it funds economic activity.  Part of the 2008 recession was an attempt to keep the finance sector afloat after the first dot-com bubble burst by shifting capital to housing (Bill Clinton actually gave an interview soon after he left the WH suggesting this was a good thing).  But obviously, this was not a great thing.  And again, healthcare needs to serve a population.  And most jobs are not highly-paid.  They are medical assistant-type jobs that barely require a HS education (though plenty of for-profit colleges will give you a certification).  I mean, it's better than being unemployed...

A major issue is that we've moved to a service economy, and increasingly fewer Americans can pay for those services.  At the same time, productivity the world over has increased, so there simply isn't enough work to be done.  Other countries will start to see similar issues as we've had in the US.  It's already happening in China.  It might be we really need to rethink some of the fundamental tenets of capitalism.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics