Where's Riley?

Most of us dream about being rich and famous when we are young but few of us achieve either.

In fact it is becoming harder and harder for the "working" person to even get a sense of security.

While not rich, most of them were able to get a reasonably good paying job with benefits including health care and a pension.

While it still required you to go to work everyday it provided a decent life, the ability to have a family and a home.

You could of course screw that up, but if you stayed sober enough, followed the rules enough you counted on having a job and making a decent living.

While it really was a post World War 2 scenario, before then we had the Great Depression, it lasted long enough to create a lasting image of America that prevails to this day.

New suburbs sprang up thanks to the wide availability of cars and all those houses required appliances and services.  WE also built the interstates and if you were able bodied and not working it was your own choice.

The cracks started as the cities lost a lot of their middle class to those same suburbs and we started to see urban decay.

Then we started to see some competition from our old WW2 adversaries who recovered and were eager to sell us cars and other things.

Companies started to shift to lower cost labor areas, first inside the country and then overseas as we promoted free trade and allowed the easy transport of goods across borders.

We then saw the robots become more and more prevalent as they grew in sophistication and displaced most if not all of the unskilled laborers.  We also saw technology allow companies to eliminate all sorts of jobs that used to be considered secure.  Clerks from secretaries to bank tellers became less and less needed.

It is going to get better as the jobs now available are generally lower paying with less benefits, if any.

Many workers have simply left the workforce as working as a clerk in a drug store is financially not much better than scraping by on the various Government programs available.

Its not the life of Riley anymore.

He is now addicted to Opioids and driving an Uber.