(09-16-2016, 11:20 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: While I'm in favor of voting for Hillary, you have missed the point here. If the hillbilly subculture is not going to push education, is not going to encourage putting honest effort into one's work, if heroin, meth and brawling remain major forms of entertainment, Hillary can only do so much for them. The failure runs far deeper than the political choice.
Education is not a panacea, not is it any kind of solution. It's part of the snake oil Democrats have pushed for three decades now. It's not as toxic as the Republican tax-cut snake oil, but it is no solution to our problems. Don't get me wrong, I myself took the education route into the "New Class" elite. My strategy as a 17 yo was simple. Pick a field (chemistry--I was good at that in HS). Get the top score or the next to top (as a fall back) in your college classes, thus racking up a good GPA in your field. Ace your standardized tests. I went to a local commuter campus and lived at home. This school was part of the Wisconsin system and its classes directly translated into classes that the flagship campus in Madison where I went to grad school, which had top chemistry and chemical engineering departments. I was an average student there. I finished got a job with Upjohn (now Pfizer), met my wife and got married and we have been there in Kalamazoo ever since and now plan to retire in 3 years with a pension, retiree health benefits and a shitload in savings (she retired in 2004 with a nice package--Pfizer merger).
But not everyone can do what I did. Most people do not score in the top 75 out of 15000 in their PSATs.
Of course lots of people who score way lower that I have gone through college gotten degrees and have done way better than me. Today there are lots more jobs that require a college degree that folks of more average academic ability can do. I've talked about the many quality, business excellence, EHS, and other type of professional positions now exist at my manufacturing facility that did not exist when I started, while we do the same sort things (make chemicals, often in the same equipment) that we did then. Just why do we need all these people to make a kg of neomycin today whereas we needed none of them to make the same kg of neomycin in 1955? The reason is the "regulatory burden" conservatives are always complaining about. Those regulatory burdens = jobs for people with college degrees (aka the "bicoastal elites"--even if they are not on the coasts). Once you see regulatory burdens as "jobs programs for the cognitive elites" (who vote by the way) you can see they ain't going away--even if the Republicans are in charge (their voters have these jobs too--if you work(ed) in the military or intelligence agencies, their contractors, or the defense industry-even if you are blue collar--this qualifies as a political make-work job).
About 17 years ago I speculated on whether we could build an economy on the "Nike effect". The idea was based on the concept of branding creating value out of nothing, a more tangible version of what is known as financial alchemy. The idea was we could have a two tier economy in which poor people would buy inexpensive products, while rich people would buy the same product (functionally) but which would be branded with a signifier of "coolness" and which would be much much more expensive. The price differential would pay for all sorts of make-work jobs for college education people, designers, IR professionals. businessmen, financial specialists etc. But it seemed to me that sooner or later people would figure out they could get the same stuff for a lot less if they just bought the basic item--or better still, the designer item at the Salvation Army or other thrift store. What I could not figure out is what about the expensive-to-produce stuff like health care, education and housing--how is that to be handled?
This is more or less what we have today. What do you do if your are like B, A, M, T, D or V (members of my family who are working poor just poor). First they earn a little more than minimum wage and so have health insurance. The health insurance benefit I get from my employer costs about as much or more than most of them earn. So they are on Medicaid. You cannot work at a lower-end working class job today and have good health insurance. If we don't want poor folks dying in the street from lack of medical care then we need something like Medicaid--which is why we have it. The Medicaid expansion from Obamacare means M, T and D have insurance whereas they otherwise would not. T's kids, my great-grandchildren) and A's kids (my grandkids) already had it thanks to the Clintons. (Can you see why I vote D?).
Education is something they do without--they cannot afford it. Sure they could go to college on loans and end up working a shit job with huge non-dischargeable debt. To get a good job that justifies loans they would have to be like me. But they can't be like me, they did not grow up in the sort of neighborhood I did. Back then, the son of a truck driver (my #2 best friend), the son of a corporate executive (my best friend) and the son of a school teacher (me) all grew up together and formed my adolescent environment that shaped me and them. And we all made it, none of us ended up falling out of the middle class. But neighborhoods like that no longer exist, corporate executives now life in gated neighborhoods. Trucks driver live in working class poor neighborhoods (B's husband is a truck driver). Executive's kids now are socialized by other executives kids, and the truck driver's kids by other poor kids. So people are more tracked today and there is less upward mobility.