The US has 94 million adults of working age out of the work force and effectively on limited fixed incomes. Or no purchasing power.
The population of the US is 320 million. In 2004 the ratio of workers to population was 71%. In 2013 it was back up to 63% which is a canard. The 94 million adults were not included from 2004 who could not find employment and gave up between 2007 and today. If they were included in the unemployment statistics today, we would be at almost 30% unemployment. We are even creating a generation of the never even got employed at this rate. The EU has the same problem. China doesn't because they artificially rig their outcomes which we and the EU have to take in the shorts and smile. We cannot compete with their prices, err money, mostly because we borrow their money to pay for their goods and our welfare states. It would take a madman to challenge this rather than wait for China to achieve whatever the end game is that empowers them.
WW2 solved this problem last time for the US and Europe during the Roosevelt imperial dynasty. He kept the US in the depression long after it could have naturally corrected itself. If he had not tried to control social justice outcomes for the very workers he was championing into the dirt. Or the policies he was putting in place to insure his party stayed in rule for the next century. Sounds familiar doesn't it.....
Back then we didn't have external competitive markets to dictate cost and price to our internal markets. The USA was the market that dictated to the world. The truth of this came after the war and the dramatic rise of the American middle class. Post WW2 we were China with better ethics.
Today, we and the EU are almost failed banana republics with mad men at the helm. And those running these banana republics are acting the part to the extreme. So global warming, running out of Oil, giant purple people eaters from Mars. What ever it takes so no one looks behind the curtain. If you are unwilling to, or, can't because the madmen and their enablers created laws to make it a crime to look behind the curtain. You will not be able to fix the problem until after the problem kills your country.
Technology has made it possible for us to not learn from any of our recent mistakes because we are following technology at such a high speed that we never have time to catch up with ourselves and reflect. Technology and the social structures evolving out of it's influences allows us to hide from ourselves and spawn new service industries to support and enable human weakness for money and political gain. Global warming, political correctness, racism, class envy, social justice, homophobia, anti religious fervor, the whole evolution of the technology revolution and our ever growing cult of everything in the world is wrong and I'm a victim. This is a very powerful emotional virus using technology at the speed of light as it's vector of contagion. The world wide phenomenon of extreme irrationalism to defend global warming or climate change or the end of Oil reserves showcases this virus and our relationship to technology.
The industrial revolution was slower so our mistakes were obvious while we still had time to reflect on ourselves. It was much more obvious that you were hiding in a bottle versus hiding in the virtual sphere seeking validation that we are victims of everything. And we had a strong public sentiment that life is full of those bad things but, no you are not a victim other than of yourself. Yet, recently, we had a social messiah elected twice because of being able to leverage technology to validate that self worship of victimhood.
So the next great global catastrophe is not something out there, it is inside of us and our dysfunctional relationship with technology. If we do not get control of that, the industrial revolution was too slow to allow us to destroy the world. And we were still too strong morally to drop anymore nukes. Now we make fun of the pope and consider Iran a victim.
