Riches to Rags

When we at the Blasphemy Blog were in high school, we spent a summer studying in Mexico. One of the many ways we found Mexico to be different from the United States was that middle class teenagers did not work in the summertime. Or at any time.

One of our teachers explained to us that this was not because of laziness; middle class Mexican teenagers would probably like to work and make a little extra money, but there were simply no jobs to be had. Mexico, like everywhere else on Earth besides Bhutan, does have McDonald's, but McDonald's in Mexico is staffed by regular working folks, not high school kids earning spending money.

These days, if reports are to be believed, the United States is becoming more like Mexico. Teenagers are still looking for the kind of entry-level, low-paying work that you used to get to pay for your first car, but those jobs are already taken by people who are trying to live on those wages.

This brings two thoughts to mind. First, what does it mean that jobs that used to go to people who didn't need the wages to live now belong to people who do?

Second, what does it mean for the teenagers of today that they're not earning their spending money the way they used to?

We are not economists at the Blasphemy Blog, but it strikes us that neither thing is good for the health of our nation's markets. Both trends, we think, indicate a general deflation of the pride of having a job. For the new full-time low income workers, having a job no longer means supporting a family; it's only part of the process, and now maybe you need a second job, or some kind of federal aid. And as far as the teenagers, never having a summer job in the first place will mean that the lessons of budgeting your own money come that much later.

The place we are headed, we fear, is a Mexico-in-the-90s-type situation, where the middle class is about eighteen percent of the population, the upper class is two percent, and the other 80 percent works at McDonald's, or possibly WalMart. It's already getting harder in this country for working class or poor parents to lift their children into the middle class through their own hard work; soon we may be a country of heirs and servants, like the old days in Europe. We founded a whole new country to get away from that, but we're headed back there.

At times like these, it's important to remember that great Americans often come from nothing. Abraham Lincoln comes to mind, but there are many great (and wealthy) Americans who were born to poverty. We like that kind of Horatio Alger story, but the best thing about it is that it's grounded in fact. But soon it may become nothing more than a myth. That would be too bad.