Comment: Re:Been there. (Score 1) 60
All this with one salary for a blue collar job with decent job security, benefits and a pension plan.
True, and that's also a highly desirable state for us to get back to. But it's not going to happen anytime soon, and for some very good reasons.
High-paying blue collar jobs have been disappearing in the US for decades, largely due to globalization. For every person who might once have had a blue-collar manufacturing job here, there is probably someone elsewhere in the world willing to do it for less. And that's bad for American blue collar workers but actually good for the world overall - there are a lot of people in countries like Bangladesh, China etc. who a generation ago who might have been subsistence farmers not really participating in the global economy and now they are moving to cities, taking jobs and buying things. That fuels tax revenues in their countries, allowing the building of infrastructure and the improvement of quality of life in many of these third world countries. Again, that's bad for us but good for the world's economic development overall.
This is certainly an arguable point among economists, but there is a lot of data pointing to the idea that pensions were always a bit of a ponzi scheme. When people are living longer, it's just not economically sustainable to carry costs like that when you could be spending that money on hiring new workers or paying your active workers more. Paying for retiree pensions and health care benefits used to add around $1500 in "dead weight" to the cost of each car for General Motors, as I recall. You saw in most of the recent airline bankruptcies that their pension obligations were the first thing that they shed to return themselves to sustainable profitability. Defined benefit plans are on the way out everywhere in the US - except the government - and arguably should be because, while it's great for the worker - was never really going to make sense in the long run to begin with.
And job security has always been a bit of a lie. In the postwar US economy that the baby boomers grew up in, the economy as a whole expanded significantly and a rising tide lifted all boats. Nobody needed to be laid off because everything was growing. But when you reach a point where some industries are going away, others change rapidly and companies reach an equilibrium point where they grow or shrink organically, people are going to lose their jobs sometimes. It's unfortunate but it's a reality.
So all your points are desirable and the US really does need to find a way to bring back a real blue collar middle class. But many of the things these folks got used to were temporary things rather than permanent. The US economy is rapidly splitting in two, into a blue-collar/lower education economy where unemployment is high and job prospects are low; and a white-collar/higher education economy where unemployment is low and that's where all the growth is happening (tech, finance, etc.) That's unlikely to change in the foreseeable future and the US needs to find a way to bring more of its workforce into the second economy where there are jobs because the first one is just not coming back.