There was a conversation on television this morning about the 23% rise in executive pay in American companies, and the stagnating or declining pay for many of the people who work for those companies. Executive pay is generally linked to the profitability of the company. Executives have decided that the profitability of the company is linked to keeping labor costs down. So American workers , in an increasingly union less environment, have to endure years without raises, reduced work hours, unpaid overtime, forced unpaid 'vacation' days, and more, in order to facilitate more profit for the company.

One side of the tv conversation was that things are not going to go back to 'normal' for the American worker. Companies, in the drive for 'profit' are sending jobs out of the country to areas where labor is dirt cheap. "The American worker be damned"  is what it comes down to.

So what is the answer for the US? This is what are 'best and brightest' have concluded - the agricultural age is long gone, the industrial age is gone, it is the 'information age' that America needs to dominate. We need to have more Americans programming computers. That is the way out of our economic malaise.

It is nothing short of astonishing to me that pseudo-serious people actually believe this is an answer. 

Half the population isn't smart enough, on their best day, to program a computer, and NEVER will be. Approximately one third of Americans graduate from college or go on to a higher degree. EVEN IF you got that up to half , which sounds very unlikely anytime soon, you would still have tens of millions of people with a high school education or less who are not going to be 'programming computers' or anything of the sort.  It is NONSENSE and extremely dangerous for the future of the United States of America for people to predict and plan for a future when the only 'good' jobs in the US are high tech jobs.

We are creating the scenario of a near future of despair, confusion, turmoil and violence or as Pat Buchanan put it , " You are creating an enormous social problem".