by Jeff Davis

Few of the paper indicators are showing it, but America has been on the long downward slide to serious and lasting depression for years. Amid all the hoopla about outsourcing and unemployment and assorted economic indicators and statistics, one fact keeps getting air-brushed out of the picture: The jobs that are being created are all low-paying service industry jobs. Nobody has any MONEY in their pocket anymore. Americans rack up a massive debt when they’re young. They get mediocre jobs that can barely make the payments and then they buy overpriced new cars and insanely overpriced homes. If they should ever lose their jobs, it’s likely they’ll be buried under a mountain of debt. The dominoes are all set up for a 1929 style crash. The only difference is that the Second Great Depression is going to happen whether we slide gradually into it or we crash dramatically.

Every dollar earned has a bill with its name on it. The American middle class, for a hundred years the bulwark of the entire capitalist establishment, is disappearing. A new survey shows that in the past three years, median incomes fell for householders under 45. Actual working income fell 8 percent, adjusted for inflation, for those under 35 and 9 percent for those aged 35 to 44.

The numbers fuel longstanding concern about whether younger generations of Americans will be able to foot the bill for the Social Security and Medicare retirement benefits of the Baby Boomers, as well as continue to pay for the massive welfare bureaucracy and a series of disastrous, money-gobbling foreign wars by the neocons who are still in power causing trouble. The new generation of workers simply isn’t earning enough to pay for it all, and at some point the house of cards will inevitably collapse, plunging America into a depression which will make the 1930s look like a picnic. It’s actually been happening for some time. Like the frog in the pot of water who doesn’t notice he’s slowly being boiled alive because the temperature rise is so gradual, we haven’t noticed the fact that we’re becoming terribly impoverished. Instead of some spectacular defining event –like the 1929 stock market crash, this process of slow economic leukemia has been going on for years.

“It’s a scary question,” says Carrie Brown, a young woman who runs a bakery in Boston. She says that for now, at least, she’s not keeping pace. She and her husband have delayed having children until “things get better” economically. They worry about whether the long, dreary, pointless wars in the Mid East will end before their future children reach 18. The fact is that things AREN’T GOING TO GET BETTER. They haven’t actually gotten better in any identifiable sense for a generation.

Her concern is shared by a lot of young White people, who are being tricked and bamboozled by blow-dried talking heads on Fox News and conservative talk radio pundits into blaming “greedy old people” instead of the series of corrupt regimes (including Clinton and both Bushes) who caused all these problems. One often-voiced worry is about “generational fairness in tax burdens” meaning that young workers are being stoked into resentment against old folks.

If America avoided these pointless wars, prevented the flood of illegal aliens and blocked the outsourcing of the last twenty years, it would be trivial to pay old folks their Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and more. But because thirty million Mexicans have flooded into the US and are bankrupting everything from the local school district to the federal government and because Bush Junior has blown 300 billion on the neocon war in Iraq, old people are going to lose out. There just isn’t enough money to pay for all the stupid things the federal government has done or let happen.

Some experts blame America’s problems on “An increasingly competitive global economy,” i.e. the hand-over-fist exportation of American jobs to Guatemala and India and elsewhere in the Third World. This is causing the drop in real income, as well as the presence in this country of huge numbers of illegal Third World immigrants willing to work without benefits for six dollars an hour. General systemic incompetence combined with boundless corporate greed has caused higher education and healthcare costs to soar through the roof. “Changing patterns of family life,” i.e. the destruction of the nuclear family, have forced millions of women into the job market, thus forcing wages down and making it even more difficult for the average man to earn a living wage and support a family.

Personal debt is soaring through the stratosphere. Over the past decade, the volume of federal student loans tripled, reaching $85 billion in new loans last year. Virtually everyone who graduates from college now does so owing tens of thousands of dollars. New laws make it harder than ever to declare bankruptcy.

One news article reports in 2003 “Personal debt excluding mortgages is about $19k per household on average, over half of which is on credit cards, a figure that is triple the statistic of 1990. Nowadays, over 40% (of) US families routinely spend more each year than they earn.”

While it’s true some Americans are fiscally conservative and go through life avoiding debt, they are becoming a smaller minority each year. The younger generation can expect to get tens of thousands of dollars in debt from their college education. Once they pay off that huge amount, they’ll face the highest-priced housing market in US history. A relatively mediocre new car costs close to $20,000. A used car that still has some life in it often costs $10,000. Yuppies who choose to buy a shiny new sports cars or the latest SUV can add $60,000 in debt, not to mention several thousand per year in additional insurance costs. Because of the illegal alien problem, public schools often fill up with Latino children forcing American families to send their children to private schools which cost about 15k per year per child.

All the rising expenses would not be that bad a problem if inflation-adjusted salaries were keeping pace. But they aren’t. New graduates are discovering that major corporations are outsourcing as many of these jobs as possible. The factory jobs at places like Ford and GM that used to provide good pay for skilled machinists without an education are rapidly becoming a thing of the past. Only college grads are likely to get good-paying jobs today. Even then, the situation is very hit-or-miss. If you choose the wrong major in college, such as computer science, and Microsoft builds a giant business complex in India employing 50,000 people to outsource those jobs, you just wasted four years of costly education.

The economic betrayal going on today is legendary. There is no light at the end of the tunnel because the tunnel has collapsed due to neglect. Our current crop of politicians are more like pirates than statesmen. They are only interested in what they can loot from the ruins of America before the final collapse. People today are more wage slaves than ever before. America could eventually recover from the outsourcing of our factories and production, but the burden created by thirty million Mexican immigrants is an anchor certain to drag the US economy to the bottom of the ocean. Only a political revolution that addresses these cancerous problems is likely to return America to the prosperity of the 1960s.