[sailaway21]

Rick,
My health coverage is provided by my employer. It is basic catastrophic coverage, with ample sized co-pays. We seem to switch carriers annually in search of better deals. The company is small. The whole system is so screwy that, with the latest carrier, it took less than a day for my wife to find a better policy for herself alone, at a lower rate, than for me to pay to have her on my policy at work. This strikes me passing odd.

It also strikes me passing odd that you would think that things were better twenty years ago than today. You must either have a different measuring stick or be on the metric system. Twenty years ago, Reagan's tax cuts were finally having their desired effect and people were finally putting the nightmare of "stagflation" out of their minds once and for all. In truth, we continue in the Reagan recovery with the "misery index" a foreign phrase to most.

The nature of our culture and economy has changed. The days of union featherbedding are pretty much over, with the exception of government employee unions. (a battle we'll be fighting soon enough) You may lament the loss of union power, I do not. I was a member of two maritime unions and they did all they could, legally and illegally, to shake me down. And that's after they beat up the companies. The days of not sailing a ship because she did not have Lifebuoy soap on board are over. The unions made it economically imperative that the companies automate even faster than might have been wise. It's just simple economics that when you can get a machine to do something cheaper over the long haul than you can pay labor, you mechanize. In the eighties you saw the manning on ships go from 45 men per ship down to 19-21 men.

A market based economy will never ensure jobs for life. One of the fundamental changes over the last twenty years is that it has become very rare for one to stay with the same company, or even career, for their entire life. For better, or worse, that is unlikely to change. Many workers actually found it to be a good thing in that it got them out of a job they'd really grown tired of, with many starting their own businesses.

If the middle class is shrinking, I'd expect that no small factor is that many are moving up. But, I suspect, that your real concern is that one cannot make as good a living as one could previously with low level skills or educational deficiencies. Bemoaning the loss of those types of jobs is one thing; advocating a return to the rewarding of inadequate education and low skill levels quite another. Rewarding failure is not a long term recipe for a vibrant national economy.

You decry the situation while typing on a form of communication that did not even exist twenty years ago. What do you expect the number of people is that are employed just so that we can type tonight? Would you rather that those employed by the computer and internet industries still be employed pumping gas? In a mature economy, the need for unions is much less as the hazards of most jobs are much less. When Social Security was enacted, approximately the same time as the start of the meteoric rise of unions, 1936, the average life expectency of the American male was 63 years. 50% were expected never to collect. One of the reasons life expectency was so much lower was that men made their livings by the hard sweat of their brow. I currently work in a field that requires equal parts physical labor and mental acquity. I do not knock holes through basement walls with a star chisel and a sledge hammer as they did twenty short years ago. I now use a hammer drill and, as a result, will have a much longer working career and probably a longer life. Somebody probably wasn't needed in the well drilling field when we all bought hammer drills. But somebody had to build those drills and, better yet, design better ones.

Today you can buy a Subaru that will blow the doors off your 1985 Pontiac Trans Am, and get double the mileage doing it. In real dollars the car even costs less! And it took 25% of the labor to produce. If your 1985 Pontiac made 100,000 miles you figured you got a good one, and you certainly babied it to get there. Today, the worst car you can name is almost assured of reaching 100k. And every car owner in America is the beneficiary of that fact.

I would challenge you to do some reading, as well. If you investigate the lists of the "rich" you will find that it is not a static list. People move in and out of that category. It was not that long ago that the secretary who invented Liquid Paper, for typing corrections, became a multi-millionaire. Today the Liquid Paper empire lies in tatters. Her heirs, rather than being bequethed a life of wealth, have probably had to use their inheritence for educational purposes. Should we subsidize the Liquid Paper union employees so that they can all retire off of the Liquid Paper production line?

Quality education, in today's America, is essential. And, yes, one of the roadblocks we face to providing that product are the teacher's unions. Don't sing the glories of the unions to me. I was in the maritime unions and I live in the heart of the auto industry. In my opinion, the companies that really need unions are those small companies, such as meat packers, who having successfully resisted unionization previously, and now no longer able to hire and abuse Americans at the rates they wish to, now hire illegal aliens. The manufacturing union battles, which were important, were mostly over and done with during the 1960's. Why fight the battle when the war is over and won?