And out-of-touch leaders don't see the need to cool things off.
(snippet)
You will know that things have reached a bad pass when Newsweek and Time, if they still exist 15 years from now, do cover stories on a surprising, and disturbing trend: aging baby boomers leaving America, taking what savings they have to live the rest of their lives in places like Africa and Ireland.
I thought of this again the other day when Drudge headlined increasing lines in London for Americans trading in their passports over tax issues, and the sale of Newsweek for $1.
Our problems as a nation have been growing on us for a long time. Their future growth, and the implications of that growth, could be predicted. But there is one thing that is both new since 1994 and huge. It took hold and settled in after the crash of 2008, but its causes were not limited to the crash.
The biggest political change in my lifetime is that Americans no longer assume that their children will have it better than they did. This is a huge break with the past, with assumptions and traditions that shaped us.
The country I was born into was a country that had existed steadily, for almost two centuries, as a nation in which everyone thought—wherever they were from, whatever their circumstances—that their children would have better lives than they did. That was what kept people pulling their boots on in the morning after the first weary pause: My kids will have it better. They'll be richer or more educated, they'll have a better job or a better house, they'll take a step up in terms of rank, class or status. America always claimed to be, and meant to be, a nation that made little of class. But America is human. "The richest family in town," they said, admiringly. Read Booth Tarkington on turn-of-the-last-century Indiana. It's all about trying to rise.
More Here.."The Greatest Bull Market Any of Us Will Ever See".
More Here..
If there are no manufacturing type jobs, and less and less stuff made in this country, things will continue to slide. When there is no tax base to balance things out, the economy will fall. People getting college degrees can't find work all over, so sooner or later many colleges will go under. The younger people have no future unless they are well connected with family or friends. All political activity at this point is fruitless as open borders let people flood in and get on the dole, and good jobs are outsourced. This country has zero hope. Read Frosty Wooldridge latest post on News with Views, it says it all.
ReplyDeleteNews with Views is a right-wing conservative site and some of their claims are off the wall. I disagree with a good deal of their articles yet I agree with Laura. Too bad it doesn't seem possible for the right and the left to come together on issues they agree on. But the right has spent too many decades making us liberals out to be baby-killing, gay-loving, commie hippie pot-smoking socialists.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was a kid on the 1960's, everything was "Made in USA". It was really hard to buy anything that was not American made. Now, almost nothing is made in the USA.
ReplyDeleteIn the book "The 8th Habit", we read that the USA has moved from a manufacturing based economy to an information based economy. One would conclude that "information" is our greatest asset and our "information" is all we have to sell. If that were true, our schools would be graduating the best of the best. The sad fact is, our schools graduate kids with little academic skills.
- We manufacture very little these days
- Our schools don't know how to teach
- Our young adults (80% or better) are functionally illiterate
In five years or less, all the kids in neighborhood will turn into criminals, for lack of jobs to match their sub-standard education. They refuse to take their education seriously and the end result will be more prison construction and not much else.
sharonsj: You wouldn't believe how many splits there are in the right wing groups and the libertarian party. I'm a drop out patriot and not joining anything. The left wing want more gov. control over free market econ. and redistribution of wealth. Even left wingers aren't in sync 100%. Both left and right have their share of control freaks. News with Views has a mix of all views, few which I read out of many. All hope is gone for this country, as patriots are divided and have been for over 50 years. Many patriots quit voting and are preparing family and hunkering down, living only for self/family. It's smart at this late date to isolate from groups and have close knit friends/family as this country is trashed for good.
ReplyDelete#4:23: Actually, students are much smarter these days than twenty years ago. The competition is a lot higher for those spots. If you check SAT, LSAT, MCAT and other scores, everyone is doing a lot better on these tests and these tests have also been made harder several times.
ReplyDeleteSo the room at the top is a lot smaller, and that trickles down. The top students from 20 years ago could very well be mediocre now, and the mediocre ones would be awful ones.
It isn't true all across the board of course, but way more students go to college now and a lot of course try very hard.
I really dislike how the old sheeple like to cast blame on the younger generations for the lack of opportunities. The opportunities just are NOT there. Young people work harder now, volunteer all the time, and they just get nowhere.
This is one of the reasons why the system is not sustainable. America mortgaged the future of the younger generations to squeeze out more for the present generations and the older generations. The entire thing is a ponzi, and like all ponzis, the people that come in at the end of it are the ones that lose everything. The older generation already benefited and the middle generation paid into it for them, but still took enough for themselves to almost break even. But the newest ones put in and got nothing, except a ton of debt and no way out.
Oh, you hand-wringers, I agree it is tempting to consider running. But what makes you think you won't be someone's dinner wherever you go! No one is going to persuade,scare, chase or drag me out of this place. Carry, maybe.
ReplyDelete@8:00pm you might want to double check your info...There have been changes to the SAT scores over the years including giving extra points to minotities...The cutting of certain areas due to the fact that some minorities couldn't grasp the ideas...Of course there's the introduction of the writing section and the inflation of score based on what year you took it in.
ReplyDeleteI need to take a look at a new test but I dare say my 1989 High School score of 1180 would probably be in 1300 range now.
Every year they make everything easier, more PC, less challenging...People don't understand that to bastardize the tests to please everyone all you've done is nullify the test.
1. Calculator Use-With the recent changes to the content of the SAT math section... These programs allow students to complete problems faster than would normally be possible when making calculations manually.
2. In March 2004 Dr. Les Perelman analyzed 15 scored sample essays contained in the College Board's ScoreWrite book along with 30 other training samples and found that in over 90% of cases, the essay's score could be predicted from simply counting the number of words in the essay. Dr. Perelman trained seniors to write essays that made little sense but contained infrequently used words such as "plethora" and "myriad." All of the students received scores of "10" or better, which placed the essays in the 92nd percentile or higher.
3. Students with verifiable disabilities, including physical and learning disabilities, are eligible to take the SAT with accommodations. The standard time increase for students requiring additional time due to learning disabilities is time + 50%; time + 100% is also offered.
4. How to make it easier for minorities and individuals who suffer from social and economic barriers. The "Striver" status to test-takers who scored 200 points higher than expected for their race, gender and income level.
5. Old scores may be recentered to compare to 1995 to present scores by using official College Board tables,[28] which in the middle ranges add about 70 points to Verbal and 20 or 30 points to Math. In other words, current students have a 100 (70 plus 30) point advantage over their parents.
6. James Lech, Ed.D., M.T.S. tested a hypothesis that the cause of the increasing rift between these national averages could be explained in part by increasingly "dumbed-down" math questions over the same decades.[31]
Remember the Oakland Ebonics Arguement?...(A poor excuse for a failure to grasp the basics of english)...In order to excuse their @#$% they pretended they had made a new language/style/colloqualism/dialect...School administrators/Black Community activists then went on TV, defending it trying to make it seem like a political/race/spiritual badge of honor.
All they did was make those children non-employable/non-functional in mainstream society.
I say the same has been done with the ACT and SAT...Everyone wants to feel good about taking the test and no one wants to test badly because then it's obviously the tests fault not the person's...(Sarcasm).
Tests are just that...Proof that you can do it...There shouldn't be any extra time for hyper/slow kids...There shouldn't be any sections taken out because Billy/Juan or Shaniqua can't grasp it.
Ineresting read, I have been a follower of Alvin and Heidi Toffler for the past 35 years. They followed cutural trends from the first recorded times up until now. These two saw all of this coming many years ago, no one, paid any attention to this.
ReplyDeleteCheck out some of his books, "Future Shock", "The Third Wave", just to name a couple.
You can read "Atlas Shrugged". still, Toffler is a read.