[Brannigans Law]

In macroeconomics it's foolish to point to one company and say "there, there is your bad guy". It's equally foolish to say that they're just providing low cost goods and are guilt free in what's become a race to the bottom in North America.

Walmart, Canadian Tire, Target, Best Buy, all these giant stores are all symptoms of a bigger issue. Globalization and the laughable lack of investment in education. Germany gets more dollars from the sale of an iPhone than China. Why? Because they have a highly trained and educated work force to make parts that can never be made in China due to the skill and training needed.

While a lot of places in Europe educated their youth last several decades, America and Canada (to a lesser extent of course) have been allowing their work force to become dumb and skill-less, creating a demand for cheap crap. We're an economy with crappy jobs, a shrinking middle class, but cheap crap to keep most people happy.

I wish a politician had the balls and eloquence to get people to buy into funding education more, making post secondary attainable for people, and selling people on short term pain (ten-ish years) for a long term gain of a highly education, well paid work force. Instead you have these giant money making corps making things worse, destroying unions and waging war on the middle class. It's short sighted but I don't blame giant corporations. They aren't people; they exist only to increase profits and pay the share holders. No one is looking out for the middle class and our children. If you think it's scary now in the USA and Canada, wait another couple decades when mortgage rates can possibly go back up to 10+%. Who could possibly afford a home with mortgage rates 10% or above? I imagine if that was the case tomorrow by Friday hundreds of thousands of people would be walking into banks handing their keys over.

Just raising the minimum wage isn't a real solution, but, it's a badly needed band aid.

edit: Just did quick math and my mortage at 10% would go from 1455 a month to 2700 dollars. At the same rate my parents paid for their 1st mortage it would be 3533. There's another thing that has people so deluded with how bad our economy and jobs are. These mortage rates are so low and affordable it's covering up a lot of problems that exist. Another 10 years from now, who knows what rates could be. It's scary to consider.