What ever happened to Michigan, Ohio, & Pennsylvania?

SoCalDem

(1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore

Thu Dec-03-09 10:56 AM
Original message

What ever happened to Michigan, Ohio, & Pennsylvania?

Edited on Thu Dec-03-09 11:25 AM by SoCalDem

Their formerly thriving economies got stolen right out from under them.

They used to have a three-pronged economy:
1> heavy industry
2> tourism
3> agriculture

Now they have very little of any of those three, and they were all inter-dependent.

The middle class guy worked in the factory with union wages & full benefits.
His family could afford to send their kids to summer camps that once dotted the countryside..these were middle class kids, whose family could afford to send them to camp for weeks at a time. The "rich-kids" had their camps too, but there were a LOT of not-rich kids who went to camp too.

These same families often had a fishing boat, and many had a "cabin on the lake" somewhere. It was probably a pretty dismal little place, but it was theirs, and it was a haven for them in the summer time.

Before A/C was everywhere, Mom & the kids often were dispatched to "the lake" during the hot summer, and Dads worked in offices with A/C or at a place that was hot year round (so they probably did not notice the extra degrees)..Dads drove "out" on the weekends, or "Batched" it , while the Moms & kids vacationed in the nature areas....and they did it without credit.

Many 50 & 60 year olds from those areas remember how all those little towns all over Michigan & Ohio & Pennsylvania came alive with city families escaping the heat.

The tourism of these states was built on MIDDLE CLASS vacationers, not the 5th Avenue types... those folks went to the Hamptons or to Europe.

Before there was Con Agra & Archer,Daniels,Midland gobbling up all the orchards & farms, or the land being sold off to build suburbs, there was a bustling economy every spring & summer at the orchards, and again in the fall when it was apple season.

Exit heavy industry, and the floors fell out-from-under the other economies as well. People who have sketchy incomes and shaky family-finances, no longer send their kids to camp or take vacations like they used to.

When the lakes are only used for high-cost fishing expeditions & the Great Lakes shore-fronts are "reserved" for the "mansions-only" people, the economy base gets tipped on its axis, and never recovers.

Every motel closed, every restaurant closed, every summer camp closed, every ticky-tacky bait shop closed, causes ripples across that community, and beyond.

It's been happening for a very long time, and it's hit critical mass.

The family whose financial lives get "gutted" at a particular time in their lives, NEVER recovers.. If you have adolescent kids, and you have been saving for their college, and dad loses his job, that savings gets used for rent or house-payments or food, and it never gets "paid back". Add to that, the fact that tuition has doubled & re-doubled, and many kids who might have gone to college before, will now NOT go. College no longer guarantees much, but it used to be a "marker" for many families. It proved that you had "made it". There were many "markers".. odd things like braces & contact lenses for the kids, that summer place, 2 cars, etc.

Markers are being given up, all over the place, and as people retreat from where they are, or where they thought they were... to a place they tried so hard to NOT be, it takes a psychological toll as well as a financial one.

What marked us as a people, was our optimism, and that's fading fast. True, over 3/5 of the population IS employed and seems secure, BUT when they look around and see others around them succumbing, through no "fault" of their own, it's not hard to see why people are not spending like they used to.

Many (most?) of these people who are barely hanging on see a pretty bleak future. Thom Hartmann said something a while back on his radio show that stuck with me. He said that in the next 15 years we will be seeing the largest transferal of "wealth"...ever.. as middle class Boomers transfer their life's worth of wealth...not to their children...but to pharmaceutical corporations, long-term care facilities, health-care insurance corporations, hospitals & doctors. After a lifetime of working, everything they managed to accumulate will be cashed in like casino chips, just to stay alive a little longer. Their children will receive little, if anything from them when they are gone.

Service economies with no safety net, only allow most people to exist day-to-day. There are few careers in these types of jobs. there are "contracts" or "jobs". The transition from career to job came within a lifetime, but the mythology lives on..in books, movies, in popular culture. It's as dead as the Dodo or the Carrier Pigeon, and it will not be returning..