[quote=FlyerInHi][quote=bearishgurl]For all you “techies” who feel threatened by a Trump presidency, how would you like to see all the “deplorables” from flyover America pack up their station wagons, pickups, and now “U-Hauls” (like they did in the 1940’s) and hightail it to coastal CA and triple up in housing and start applying for jobs? I have no doubt that a large portion of them have college degrees in the various IT specialties.
Why shouldn’t this massive group have living-wage jobs to choose from in their own locales? Why should the vast bulk living-wage jobs in America be concentrated on the West Coast and Eastern Seaboard?
These people are Americans (hundreds of thousands of them are Native Americans, btw). Don’t they deserve to make a respectable living (as YOU do) in their own regions??
The landscape of the US has literally been (financially) “hollowed out” by NAFTA. This doesn’t bode well for any American citizen …. not even the coastal dwellers.[/quote]
Did you say before that, notwithstanding their lack of college education, Trump supporters are doing well in flyover country. They have paid off houses, vacation homes at the lake, toys galore and plenty of savings for retirement.
They should be happy. What are they bitching about? Please give us a list of their grievances, if any.[/quote]I’ve posted here that my OWN peeps are doing well. They are ALL boomers …. plus 3 WWII/silents and 3 Greatest Gen (age 82-90) left. THEY are the ones with the defined benefit pensions, eligible for Medicare (most of them) and bought up residential, commercial, industrial and agricultural land when it was dirt cheap (in America’s former “dust bowl”). THEY are the ones who have inherited quarterly lease and royalty payments from gas and oil activities appurtenant to parcels they inherited. THEY are the ones who are living like your description, above, brian.
Their GenX and millenial kids and grandkids …. um, not so much. Only 2 of them that I know of managed to get fantastic-paying jobs in the oil fields with Halliburton. They are gone from home probably 48 weeks per year (off and on). One of them has already paid off he and his elementary-schoolteacher spouse’s fixer-upper 75 year-old house they bought 3 years ago and is still away from her and their new baby 48 weeks per year working in any one of six states. Oilfield workers can’t spend their whole lives at those jobs because their bodies will wear out and they are isolated much of the time. Much like fashion modeling, these young workers must attempt to qualify for these jobs while they’re 18-20 years old and work them as long as the employer will have them and save all their earnings for homes and to get themselves established. (Halliburton prefers to hire big, strong young men.) The other young man (age 27) working for Halliburton in the oil fields has already paid off two brand new vehicles and is in the process of buying a house. He is also gone 48 weeks per year. One more young man (age 28) had the good fortune to become a CPA and was immediately courted (and hired) by Big Oil upon his graduation from college with a degree in accountancy. The rest of my Gen X/millenial peeps are only still there after HS/College graduation because their boomer and beyond parents subdivided their land, gave them a parcel for a house and even gave them ranch land or other (leased) land with agricultural enterprises on it to work and manage (some of my peeps were getting too old to work all of it). Other general contractors in the family built them houses on those parcels with a very thin profit margin and the construction loans were cosigned by the boomer parents and held until their kids could qualify for a take-out mortgage. If my peeps didn’t do this, their kids would have moved to distant cities which had better wages and taken their children (the grandchildren) with them.
Without a lot of family help to get established, a lot of working-age adults in these flyover states couldn’t make it. Even schoolteacher starting pay there is just over 50% of what it is in coastal CA. All the former living-wage manufacturing jobs in the area and in some cases, even the entire state are gone. Some small towns have been turned into ghost towns when the ONE large employer there closed up shop causing nearly all the residents to eventually flee to places where they could earn a living.
The “golden age of opportunity” (experienced by my generation and above) has been over for the last ~20 years (depending on locale). There is no longer a guarantee of a lifetime job if one performs well and defined benefit pensions are almost non-existent. A HS graduate from a state where its industry has been hollowed out by NAFTA faces a double whammy. Not only MUST they leave home for a post-secondary education or training after HS graduation (and pay for housing to do so as well as borrow for school if their parents couldn’t help), they must often accept their first FT job after graduation far away from their hometowns in order to be able to make any respectable living at all …. or join the military (and many do). There is often nothing at all left for them within an ~80-mile radius of their hometown except scanty minimum wage positions. Even then, the (secondary) city closest to their hometowns doesn’t even have any industry left which pays a living wage.
There is a huge swath of our country which suffers from obsolescence due to large manufacturers who fled the region. What do you expect the affected inhabitants to do if they need a good job and can’t find one and they’re dead broke but living in the only environment they have ever known (near their families)?
