Quoted: he identifies three broad and related trends — none of them new to the Bush years but all of them, he believes, exacerbated by this administration's policies — that together threaten the future of the United States and the world. One is the role of oil in defining and, as Phillips sees it, distorting American foreign and domestic policy. The second is the ominous intrusion of radical Christianity into politics and government. And the third is the astonishing levels of debt — current and prospective — that both the government and the American people have been heedlessly accumulating.

While he mentions it somewhat in passing, I think a key element of Alan Blinder’s article is
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Thinking about adjustment assistance more broadly, the United States may have to repair and thicken the tattered safety net that supports workers who fall off the labor-market trapeze ...?<<

What he doesn’t talk about is how this is to be financed. IIt may require a fundamental rethink of the right wing economics that have come to dominate US economic thought in the past 20 years.

While this article is a discussion of the impact of globalization on the ‘workers’ in the US, it does not address the vast opportunities that this is creating for ‘capitalists’ and entrepreneurs. This ‘Third Industrial Revolution’ is creating the opportunity for people to make vast fortunes very rapidly, witness Google - for one, because vast global markets can be quickly and rapidly reached (i.e. enabling revenue) and secondly because offshoring is reducing cost – net result is high profitability and thus wealth.

Entrepreneurs living in the US are best positioned for this. Even while Infosys and Wipro are visible Indian success examples, they are dwarfed by Google, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo, Starbucks, Blue Nile etc and coming on their heels FaceBook and other countless emerging examples that many of us grey haired old school types are unaware of.

So the US pyramid is going to sharply widen - with the richest getting much richer and the bottom (which could include the otherwise middle class that Alan Blinder refers to) requiring a much better safety net.

So question: will it soon be time to have a new ‘New Deal (FDR’s)’?