The time has come to start paying the piper for what this administration has done. I just cringe to think of what the payments will be to start paying the Iraq war off.....a war which keeps siphoning money into the endless pit and seems to have grown a mind of it's own which politicians are scared to even think about.

Your basic greed resulting in outsourcing at work.

The old American economy was built on the large discretionary money of middle American wage earners. That time is gone. Over the last 20 years, middle Americans have been squeezed by stagnant wages on one hand, and rising non-core inflation (food and energy) on the other. The American economy maintained its old standards by having Middle class Americans go into debt. Well, that was unsustainable.

The big business war on labor unions, tax breaks for the rich, deficit spending, rewarding business for shipping jobs overseas all contributed to this situation. (How does deficit spending hurt the middle class? Our THIRD largest item on the budget is the INTEREST on our National Debt, about $429 bill/ year. That is $429 bil that is not going for infrastructure, jobs, R&D, education, etc, etc)

America will not gain its former health until the Middle class regains its access to large discretionary incomes.
Period.

It IS class warfare. And the rich are winning.

Gotta be Hillary's fault, right? Everything else is.

I am not surprised at the drop in retail sales in recent months, and in part I blame retailers themselves for their situations. To keep prices down and profits up, they have forced all but a small part of their non-food products to non-USA manufacure, eliminating those people that did make products here at reasonable pay from buying.
Because of longer supply lines, they have to make guesses at to ordering, meaning overstocking or making bad choices in goods then having to cut prices to less than profitable to move the goods if they don't sell or not having enough of demanded goods where they can make a profit.
Then you have a domino effect from the overstocking issue so that if Kole's and JC Penneys cut prices, then Macy's has to cut them more to get the customers in and then more cuts by Kole then another round of deeper cuts of prices further destroying profits. Then too you have a finate amount of demand due to lower pay to spend on clothing, stretching out longer lives from stuff and delaying buying.
As to Henry Ford and the '$5 day' pay, part of the reason was not so much to create more buyers who could afford to buy the cars they made, it was to reduce the extemely high rates of turnover of staff due to the horrible high pressure working conditions in his factories.

Gee, I wonder what's going to happen when people get their stimulus checks from W? Think they're going to run out and spend them on crap?

It would be a real terrible shame if these big box retailers had to close down their stores and let smaller buisinesses open in their place.

Time to start downsizing the workforce of coolies in China. Twice the hours half the pay!

And those big round hats will be replaced with visors manufactured from rice paper.

And no more shoes either! What do you think God invented callusses for?

too bad for the retailers....guess we can live without chinese products, in return our landfills get a reduction.

maybe if the "retailers" helped bring Mfg jobs "back home, where they belong, it might help. you know, the consequences of becoming gainfully employed in a family-wage job?

How so? Bush keeps talking about how prosperous we are. Are you suggesting [say it ain't so] that the Prez is a bit daft?

looks like the US consumer is embracing the buddhist philosophy that attachment to material things brings misery(hunger and torn underwear). walmart should stock up on little buddha icons to improve sales.

Excerpts from Time magazine's 100 Most Important People of the 20th Century:

http://www.time.com/time/time100/builder/profile/ford.html

Henry Ford

He produced an affordable car, paid high wages and helped create a middle class...

By Lee Iococca

"...In 1905...his backers at the new Ford Motor Co. were insisting that the best way to maximize profits was to build a car for the rich...

...he thought that the guys who made the cars ought to be able to afford one themselves so that they too could go for a spin on a Sunday afternoon. In typical fashion, instead of listening to his backers, Ford eventually bought them out.

...Ford instituted industrial mass production, but what really mattered to him was mass consumption. He figured that if he paid his factory workers a real living wage and produced more cars in less time for less money, everyone would buy them.

His vision would help create a middle class in the U.S., one marked by urbanization, rising wages and some free time in which to spend them.

...The same year (1914), Henry Ford shocked the world with what probably stands as his greatest contribution ever: the $5-a-day minimum-wage scheme. The average wage in the auto industry then was $2.34 for a 9-hr. shift. Ford not only doubled that, he also shaved an hour off the workday... The Wall Street Journal called the plan "an economic crime," and critics everywhere heaped "Fordism" with equal scorn. But as the wage increased later to a daily $10, it proved a critical component of Ford's quest to make the automobile accessible to all...

...if it hadn't been for Henry Ford's drive to create a mass market for cars, America wouldn't have a middle class today."

Will someone please tell GW Bush how many years are in four decades. I'm losing confidence in this guy.

...the nights grow short when you reach December.

I tell you, the idiots running the show have put us in a very vulnerable position. With the purchasing power of the middle class dwindling faster than you can say "outsourcing and globalization", we are that much less able to purchase our way out of a paper bag. I cannot believe how myopic Congress and the leadership was in this whole free trade, outsourcing, and globalization debate. Clearly it is having a very negative effect on the ability of the economy to recovery. Of course, the huge problems in the mortgage sector with bankruptcies didn't help either.

We might very well face another Depression similar to the one experienced in the late 20's and 30s of the 20th century. Where's FDR when you need him.