Decline

There are fewer of us working today as a percentage of our population:


My guess is that this number won't be increasing anytime soon; I think that as more boomers retire they will only offset the number of currently unemployed people re-entering the workforce. Besides, the great run-up in the percentage already occurred as women entered the workforce in the 70s and 80s, to counterbalance their insatiable lust for their own cars, another 800 square feet of housal unit space per person than what they grew up in, and of course their own cellularized telephones, iPods, and laptop computers.

Notwithstanding a steady or perhaps declining percentage of workers comes a fifteen trillion dollar national debt that will, perhaps, someday have to be repaid. Or perhaps not. But clearly, maintaining even a balanced budget is harder with fewer workers, because as the percentage decreases fewer will be paying taxes and more will be sucking off the public teats of Medicare and Social Security.

But why, would you at all suppose, our labor force would increase? There are at least three reasons I can think of why U.S. labor will only find itself on foreign shores over the coming decades:

• Labor in Asia and Latin America is cheaper, primarily because they burn less oil. They don't have the same massive overhead of benefits, don't have to get taxed as much to gold plate their roads to get them to work from their 45 mile distant housal units, etc.
• The cost of electricity to be used in manufacturing is cheaper; coal is powering all of China's growth and they're exempt from climate legislation. The air in Beijing is so fucking dirty as a constant reminder how they've not yet implemented the same expensive pollution measures as the U.S. has.
• Taxes and benefits are most certainly lower, probably in both real and percentage terms. They don't have the same massive, massive social programs as we do here, which could by themselves bankrupt our nation without some controls.

So, going forward, the former power transformer welder in Pittsburgh, PA who used to make $37/hour will find the voltage to his own housal unit transformed by Brazilian and South Korean transformers, while he shuttles himself off to work as a forklift driver for Target making $16/hour. Along with a flat participation rate, we're also seeing a flat wage rate as good manufacturing jobs are outsourced and lower quality service jobs fill the void.

So not only are fewer people working to pay taxes, their wages are flat while government expenditures for social programs is rocketing upward. We are indeed heading into interesting times to be a decent wage earner here in the U.S. -- we're going to have to support all this overhead somehow, lest it come crashing down over us. Can we do it?