What is 2007 like?

The minimum wage in 1997 was $5.15 and hour and ten years later it has not budged, yet the price of gasoline has gone from less than a dollar a gallon to over $4.50/gallon! A regular house from $100,000 to about $400,000.

But why are people getting poorer rather than richer? The North American Continent with its vast array of natural resources can support high standard of living. The critical infrastructure of fiber optics was developped to enable fast internet connections.

However that is our greatest strength as well as weakness. The internet now allows US firms to outsource high technology jobs to India. Why pay a US programmer $30,000 a year when an Indian with a PHD makes only $3,000 a year. Outsourcing of top talent is what allows people in the US making $40/hour in the US to be replaced by people making 40 cents/hour in China.

We see a dramatic decline in salaries and employment opportunities for white colar work that can now be done cheaply overseas. The bottom of the ladder jobs are still there, but these have failed to keep up with inflation and many illegal immigrants want these jobs and are willing to work below the minimum wage.

Corporations have decided that each individual's functional contribution should be compensated at a much lower level. The rich have gotten richer and the poor poorer.

Using robotics we should be now in a golden age, after all there is no more cold war. Using artificial intelligent machines we should enjoy a productive capacity far greater than we had ten years ago with a dramatic increase in GNP.

In fact our salaries should be many orders of magnitude greater than they were just ten years ago, but we allowed ourselves to be sold a scarcity model.

There is no oil shortage, this covenient fraud was created by billionaire oil men intent on ripping off the American people. Our current Texas oil man president is in cahoots with the big oil companies to artificially inflate the already high price of petroleum.

Just like they lied about Iraq's WMD, they lied about oil, the shortage is in good high paying jobs.