Truth Worth Telling : A Reporter's Search for Meaning in the Stories of Our Times (9781488053627) by Pelley Scott

Author:Pelley, Scott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin Sales Corp
Published: 2019-03-22T14:42:41+00:00

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For many years in America, blue collars have been turning red hot. The middle class has suffered with zero growth in inflation-adjusted income for the last five decades. To be exact, less than zero. The US Department of Commerce—using inflation-adjusted, 2016 dollars—reports that median income of men in 1973 was $38,921. In 2016, it was $52 less—$38,869.3 Middle-class families were worse off than their parents. There are many reasons: the creative destruction of twentieth-century industries by twenty-first-century technologies, tax policy, federal and state regulations on businesses, the decline of labor unions, Wall Street’s myopic obsession with quarterly growth and competition from overseas. Carlos Hernandez was right. China’s pool of workers without a college degree is nearly four times larger than the same workforce in the United States.4 5 When innovations in transportation bridged the Pacific, Chinese workers didn’t have to leave home to dominate American craft industries such as textiles, furniture and steel. Everyone knows high technology is the engine of the new American economy—but our schools haven’t caught up. The former CEO of Caterpillar, Doug Oberhelman, once told me that he wanted to open new American manufacturing plants for his mining and construction equipment. Many of his customers were in the US and, Oberhelman explained, Caterpillar would save a fortune in shipping its enormous machines. But he said he could not find enough young Americans with the education to operate high-technology machine tools. Oberhelman also lamented that when he did find an educated candidate, they often failed the drug test.

The most fundamental fact driving American society is this: the upper half of Americans takes home about 90 percent of all income, while the lower half takes home about 10 percent.6 In 2016, few in Middle America could cite these numbers, but everyone could feel them.

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