2 – Time Travel for Jobs

What a crazy time! We arrived a short time before the election of President Obama. Every day, the news was full of stories about banks collapsing. Not small banks, but big famous ones. Banks that I had heard of! It’s funny how you learn all this stuff when you travel through time, since you really cannot do much more than hang out at the library and read stuff. Traveling back into your own past (or future) can cause genuine problems. Let us just say it’s best to hang out where you will not be.

Soon the economy was shedding jobs like a cold weather dog in the springtime. So, I figured out when things were “good” as the first order of business. Can we get back to what worked? After reviewing conflicting data, the peak of the US economy was around 1964. The country had recovered from the shock of Kennedy’s death. The Beatles took a mixture of musical influences and changed music by loosening the boundaries of all those influences, creating a mosaic that succeeded in both the pop and artistic realms. What the Beatles were doing was creating/reflecting a template of how large-scale economic prosperity can work. But other things were blowing in the wind. It was a peak prosperity time and still all was not well. Bob Dylan fronted the movement of the beats into a large cultural movement, pointing out the failures and false assumptions underneath the surface of all the wealth. There was an uneasiness brewing about this Viet Nam business. But overall, economically, the country was bursting at the seams. The Middle Class was at its peak. Unfortunately, the wages were largely going to households headed fiscally by a white male wage earner. Usually, they were vets of WWII, and whether they attended college, they could all afford to send their kids to college from a single paycheck. Civil Rights laws were being passed, and the President also took on poverty as a problem to be eliminated, just like polio in the 1950s! The intention was to expand the Middle Class to minorities.

So, what went wrong? As I looked up various articles and books on the subject, I discovered a bunch of reasons. Some said it was the introduction of women into the workplace, nearly doubling the labor pool chasing the same available dollars to pay labor. Others said it was the unions. Many believed they became greedy and kept striking for more pay and benefits. Those actions reduced available dollars for non-union workers. Reacting to these unverified beliefs, conservative economic ideologues began feeding the public with ideas that I knew through hindsight accomplished none of their objectives. Finally, a large contingent picked up the grumbling of people that had not attained a middle-class economic status. The conservatives noted that welfare was too generous, taxes too high, and the government too big. As the 1960s progressed into the 1970s, each one of these arguments gained followers.

None of them really made much sense to me, but all of them seemed to have a whiff of truth to them. Perhaps I was looking at this wrong? If I figured out when the Middle Class stopped growing, the answer might become obvious.

Just a side note about reintegrating your body when you come back from a time traveling trip. Recent events of your traveling self melt from your memory. I recall betting a lot of money on the Red Sox winning the World Series in 2013. Now if I can just recall where I stashed the winnings! Damn.

Still recovering.