Downward Shift in Mobility

Frank Levy has noted that, by accident or design, articles reviewed in daily newspapers gave rise to a sense that American income inequality was growing (Levy, 1-2). This sense had been building for over a decade and had generated a list of fears as follows: (1) American families are splitting apart into the rich and the poor while the middle class vanishes, (2) The American job market is developing two tiers in which middle-income manufacturing jobs are lost and replaced by a few high-paying jobs and many low-paying jobs in the service sector, (3) Young workers, the baby boomers, are worried that they will not live as well as their parents, and (4) a growing proportion of children are being raised in poverty, and it is arguable that welfare programs themselves are responsible for this poverty through the creation of a growing, dependent underclass (Ibid., 4).

What went wrong? Levy suggests that, like people caught in the midd

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nlarging their benefits" (Lamm, A32). Lamm's voice is not the first to be raised against generational privilege. Mark Featherman, a librarian at the Jewish Theological Seminary, complained about the massive national debt created in the 1980's by a nation unwilling to live within its means. He lamented that it would be his generation faced with payment of the bill: America had a party in the 1980's and we, the twentysomething generation weren't invited. While high flying S & L robber barons were making millions with other people's money, while men of bad conscience were constructing investment houses of paper, we were making our way through college and graduate school, taking out loans to finance our educations. Odd, then, that now that the party's over, we should get stuck with the bill . . . But for those of us just entering the work force, austerity is not something we have chosen; it was chosen for us. The baby boomers have a long-term lock on the upper levels of the marketplace, and we face increased competition for entry level jobs. Who will be made to pay for the good times of the last decade? It doesn't take a genius to figure out that it will be us, the youngest and rawest members of the labor force
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Approximate Word count = 2125
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)

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