The problem is that the economy does not produce enough jobs that require college degrees.
.. One sign of the downshift is that much of the recent job growth has been in lower-paying occupations. Worse, there is little evidence of a turnaround. In the past five years, postings for jobs that do not require a college degree have steadily outpaced postings for those that do.
.. roughly one-third of college graduates who spend their work lives in jobs that do not require a degree
Workers Are Getting a Bit More of the Economic Pie (and Shareholders Less)
For example, average hourly earnings for nonmanagerial private sector workers rose 2.56 percent in 2015 in a year of very low inflation. That number was only 1.69 percent in 2012, when inflation was higher.
Working-Class Fraud
With Trump, you can be sure of one thing: He will betray those people. We know this because he already has. Wage stagnation is the most glaring symptom of a declining middle class. Trump’s solution? He believes that “wages are too high.”
.. Well then, how about the maids, bartenders and food servers at his five-star hotel in Las Vegas? They’ve been protesting in front of his gilded monolith because he will not allow them to join a union, which could raise their pay an additional $3 an hour. China and Mexico are not a problem there. Other hotels in Vegas pay union wages. Las Vegas is one of the few success stories for low-skilled people looking to ride an escalator to a better life. But Trump, the working class zero, is sticking it to them.
.. But even China is losing $10 billion a year on its struggling steel industry. Manufacturing jobs are in global decline, as robots replace people. “When I’m president,” said Trump, waving his hand as if holding a magic wand, “steel is coming back to Pittsburgh!” No sane economist, or even steel industry shill, believes this.
The Clintons Have Lost the Working Class
Clinton lost among young voters by nearly 6–1, and among independents by 3–1. Most arrestingly, Sanders won voters with an income of less than fifty thousand dollars by 2–1.
.. There’s a lot of talk about Clinton’s campaign repeating the chaos and errors of 2008, but that year she had the white working-class vote. Clinton’s candidacy looks narrower than ever, more confined to those whose experience of life approximates her own. Last night, in New Hampshire, the rare demographic group she won was those with incomes of more than two hundred thousand dollars a year. For now, at least, Clinton has become the wine-track candidate.
.. Bill Clinton, once the Party’s great channeller of working-class pain, surfaced, gaunt and joyless and wearing lumberjack red plaid. But his speech on Sunday had little of the old empathy; it was just a nasty blast at Sanders, whom the ex-President called “hermetically sealed” from reality.
.. Perhaps residual working-class loyalties, and her own strengths, will be enough to carry Clinton through the primaries. But the enthusiasm for her candidacy increasingly seems concentrated among affluent, older voters who are already committed members of the Democratic Party. That is not the most promising platform from which to begin a general-election campaign in any year, and especially not in a vigorously populist one.
.. But, in Iowa and New Hampshire, the trouble seemed broader than that: it ran through all of those people who have not yet made it. During the nineteen-nineties, the Clinton coalition ran along aspirational lines, drawing a hard line between virtuous workers and welfare recipients, and between hard-working professionals and capitalists, to summon the upwardly mobile. But the revelations of inequality have meant that aspirational talk has fallen flat, and the experience of 2008 has fractured faith in established leaders to fix it.