I have exactly the same fear as you express here, Tracy... one day there will only be McJobs or no jobs in our slice of the world.
We'll always need delivery people and garbage people and sales people and medical people and teachers and maintenance (roads, buildings, etc) people and firefighting people and police (probably way more than now :( ) but not much else because ALL other work is being done in China or ???. I mean, what does come after the "knowledge economy"?

Now with everyone competing for all the jobs listed earlier, most will still be unemployed. So how will we pay for the police and firefighters and teachers with people paying no taxes (unemployed) or McJob tax rates? The answer is, we won't UNLESS everyone agrees to work for a coupla bucks a day. Millionaires will each hire several but that really won't help overall.

I'm afraid that I don't like what I see for the future allowing that things proceed as they are now doing.

Jim

>Hi Jim,
>
>I look at this a little differently. I know that based on numbers alone that more new jobs are actually being created than the number of jobs lost. My problem is with the type of jobs being created versus the type of jobs being lost. True there may be a few small business owners that are just starting out that once were at the top of their fields. The number of positions they hire and the amount of salary they can afford to pay is not comparison though. Over many years we have lost factory work and production work far greater than the number of IT jobs lost more recently. Those factory jobs are being filled by low-wage employees in other countries that do not have the standard of working that we enjoy here nor the medical benefits. Eventually the whole world will be working for cheaper and with no benefits just to compete. We will have stepped back in time to the days before the evil unions and labor laws were instituted. While the IT jobs were moving overseas or just
>disappearing, factory jobs continued to be desolved also and moved overseas or eliminated completely. An individual that worked for years in a factory may have been a skilled worker in his field, but not in comparison to the amount of time and education invested in an IT field. I worked in a factory when I was younger and was very good at it. It just takes the ability to learn to do repetitive tasks and the ability to do them quickly. Even factory workers that have lost their positions can go for retraining and switch to another field and end up better off economic wise than they were before. Not so for the high tech field. The government is not going to invest even 1/4 of what each of us have invested to get to where we are today. Sure we could retrain for another field but it would likely be a less technical field and the pay would be less. You can be replaced by another worker more easily because the investment to learn the trade is much less and hence more competitive.
>That does not bode well for our economy at all. Eventually we will all be working at McDonalds, painting houses, or doing home repairs and all of our high tech positions will be located in foreign countries.