The old high wage middle class jobs - the ones that allowed the working class father to support the family so that the mother could stay at home with the kids, i.e., the heyday of the American Family - were destroyed by Reagan's partnership with corporate America (of which both parties were collaborators, including Clinton).
Corporate America came to Reagan and said: "we want cheaper operating conditions. We want cheaper labor and fewer regulations. We no longer want to be punished for outsourcing to Mexico, Asia, and the 3rd world. We want higher profits"
Reagan - the savior of corporate America, i.e., the first president to truly unwind the Liberal protection of high wages and benefits - agreed to ditch the overpaid, entitlement fed middle class in favor CHEAP 3rd World LABOR. He gives the upper class higher profits, and the lower classes credit cards and religion. People don't get it: any time a social order transfers wealth from the masses to the elite, we see a rise of religion (to "manage" that desperation). [Many of the Republicans on this message board probably don't understand this point because they get most of their history from Movement Conservatism. They have never study the ways in which Religion was used as opiate for the serfs, to calibrate them to their miserable existence. The feudal lords promised them salvation in the next life in order to make the toil of this life more bearable. This is why Reagan famously teamed with Pat Robertson and the moral majority: because he was sending a huge group of Americans into toil]
Indeed, wages & benefits, since Reagan, either fell or remained stagnant in order to increase profits on top. Jobs have been cut and/or shipped to cheap labor markets in order to increase profits on top. And with every lost job or slashed benefit, another credit card arrived in someone's mailbox (...remember: if you cut wages, you need to give people another means to consume, i.e., Visa & Master Card. And when they run out of room on their credit cards, you need to give them the ability to borrow against their homes. And when the housing market crashes and the banking system dies - and the American way of life dies - you blame the black guy. Scapegoat 101. Brilliant!!)
Folks: the jobs are not coming back under any administration. Bush had the worst job creation of any president in the past 50 years not because he was a bad president, but because America no longer makes anything. We traded manufacturing for shopping malls, i.e., production for consumption, wages for credit cards. Since Reagan helped corporate America ship manufacturing to ultra-cheap, dictator run labor markets (where workers make pennies a day), the American economy has been sustained purely by the expansion of credit. This makes sense, right? Because when you get rid of the jobs and the wages, the only thing left is credit . . . aka debt.
America swallowed poison in 1980, and no president since has done a thing to save the patient.
Unemployment is only going to get worse. The Dems are lying.
