Some skill. New England Tractor Trailer pumps out drivers by the gross.
Very few earn anywhere's near 1800+ a week.

I have a CDL with all endorsements including hazmat and passenger. I
don't drive a truck for a living as I'm not interested in living in a
sleeper and working 100 hour weeks for about $35k a year net which is
what the average driver for the "Big Five" (Swift, Schneider, Werner,
JB Hunt, and one other which seems to change every year) makes. I'm
too old to work the docks or drive casual long enough to get on with
YellowRoadway or UPS Freight. And as a white male getting on with
Greyhound would be not worth the bother.


SNIPPED

All of your senators have vested retirements (18,000 a month) after serving
one term.
They have vested health care, and most had inherited wealth to begin with.
Do you wonder why they are in the market (they can afford to be, you're
paying the tab) and the rich always get richer at the expense of a
lessening middle class...

SNIPPED

You've been listening to Limbaugh for too many years. Most kids starting out
can barely afford to pay their bills, let alone invest money in a 401K or
IRA.
Most folks don't have 30 years in front of them. Baby boomers never had
401Ks or IRAs when they started off.

I opened this with the following: "Your retirement planning is YOUR
RESPONSIBILITY! It is NOT the responsibility of government. It is NOT the
responsibility of your employer. It is NOT the responsibility of your
union. The responsibility is Yours alone!" It is true!

If the jobs continual to be outsourced, and if the trade deficit continues,
and if
foreign scab labor is allowed to bid against union scale you're going to
find
your savings will have very little buying power when the worth of the dollar
crashes on the world market. Government is the one who is giving away and
borrowing from social security and allowing the raping of this country.

Pete k1zjh

/s/ DD, W1MCE

Well Uncle Peter, we both know that it is impossible to live on Social
[in]Security. That's a given.

Since you are responsible for your retirement, not government nor business, what
do you propose?

The world economy envisioned by Adam Smith and Thomas Paine in the late 1700s is
now here. Business will do whatever is necessary to survive and be profitable in
a very competitive world wide economy. Businesses will succeed and fail.
Government can't stop it! Again I ask, "What do you propose?"

What government must do is make absolute arbitrage of labor
expensive.

Chinese labor is cheap because, in addition to being low skilled, not
speaking English, and not being terribly imbued with a sense of
precision workmanship, it is artificially suppressed by its own
government, for the advantage of its ruling class. Also, there are no
environmental protection, worker safety, product liability or other
such issues it presents or concern it. A company taking designs and
procedures invented here with people trained and educated at American
societal expense and building it over there is simply doing what most
very successful enterprises-from Ford Motor Company to Microsoft to
the Mafia-have done to make huge amounts of money. They have
privatized the profits and commonized the costs of doing business.

There is an extent to which that's a necessary cost for societal
progress, and an extent to which it is nothing more than outright
destruction of the social fabric. What started as "constructive
engagement" of China has reached that point because it makes a few
people-the CEO's of major corporations, certain politicians, and stock
speculators-insanely wealthy at the expense of everyone else.

If you have enough money and enough balls and can speculate in stock
successfully and get out of the market before it finally blows up,
putting your assets in physical commodities such as gold in your
defensible posession, you stand to be one of the Big Winners. But it's
like a casino: if the house didn't have the odds, there would be no
house. We can no more all do this than we can all take our life
savings and go to Vegas and gamble ourselves rich for life. A few can
succeed: most will be bankrupt and the casinos will make a lot of
money. For MOST people the stock market is a casino, no more, and no
less.