The future of American hitech 4583

On Sat, 11 Jun 2005, oldpif

I agree with OldPif on this. The USA's economy is evolving towards an economically fragmented society with few rich (both getting richer and a few more every year as those below the "millionaire threshold" just pop above that threshold AND as a relatively few people decide that money is the only thing to pursue and to pursue it any way they can including crime and cheating while simultaneously the mbutt majority will see zero gains in income for an increasing fraction. There are already studies out there showing that the bottom 20% are actually regressing to levels of greater poverty.

Of course the mechanism by which all of this is done includes, besides egregious white collar cheating and crime, all manner of tweaks, tricks, and gimics that play in the gray areas of economics (including US companies gutting their US-based plants and moving operations to 3rd world countries), accounting (fudging the books), tax evasion (abusive tax shelters, loopholes), going "off the books," and people in control of power (including our president making war in Iraq based on a lie, and the war is not going well, either, and including CEOs who rape and pillage their own corporations eg. Kenneth Lay, Richard Scrushy, Dennis Kozlowski, etc.).

Finding honorable, honest, fair, competant, hard-working people who follow that priceless thing called a "work ethic" seems to be a rare event these days. So, besides being in a post-industrial economy (for decades), and now, as service work is being exported we are becomming a post-service economy. What will be next as the level of poverty in the USA increases? Medicare, Medicaid go broke? Social Security goes...where? Shall we be a post-economy economy?