[andsoitis]

> Now if you're wondering why there's an epidemic of homelessness and poverty in California, and it's become the state with the largest income gap in the USA, well, that's why.

Because companies moved low skill labor elsewhere because it is cheaper there?

[photochemsyn]

As you move up the manufacturing ladder, skill levels rise fairly quickly - and many college graduates would struggle with these jobs, without undergoing a fair amount of training. Laser welding is fairly high-skill - a mixed combination of laser types, gas feeds, high-voltage equipment, compatibility issues with different laser types and materials, etc. Likewise, auto assembly and steel production are fairly high-skill jobs.

Even the developer world has seen this trend - why pay US wages to developers if you can get the same labor at one-fifth the price in India?

The result of course is the minting of more American billionaires, the conversion of domestic property markets into gambling casinos and rental emporiums, and most troublingly, the loss of much technological know-how to other countries. Radio Shack used to provide electronics hobbyists, whose day jobs were simple electronics assembly, with products; that ended and they tried to become a retailer of Chinese-made products before going out of business.

It's basically the story of the greedy investor class who killed the goose that laid their golden eggs.