Today's WSJ article " "How Polarizing Job Scene Squeezes Middle" is an informative article on the changing job market. However, a more infomative approach would have examined the historical shifts in job markets in the U.S. and in other countries that have experienced industrial and technological development. I believe such an examination would yield a similar change in the job scene going back to the Stone Age. I also believe we would see that industrial and technological shifts move more swiftly than people are willing to react to their changing effects.

People get comfortable in their life and work habits. Many children who grew up in households where the bread winner worked on the assembly line in a unionized automobile factory in the 1950's through the early 1990's, benefited from a solid middle class lifestyle of a decent home, nice cars, family vacations, excellent paid healthcare and great retirement benefits. That experience, in many cases, motivated those children and their friends to seek the same employment, expecting the same benefits.

Had the public education system done its job and taught basic elementary economics in addition to its preaching of socialism, high school graduates would have at least understood that globalization and new technologies were major forces beginning to impact the structure of the job market. With the proper education, they could have predicted that these changes would cause companies to become uncompetitive in the new global market. A little bit of applied common sense, with the help of teachers not burying their heads in the sand, would have led to the conclusion that these uncompetitive companies would simply run out of money providing free health care and retirement benefits. Teachers could have used current events and newspaper articles to promote discussions in class on the prospects of companies having to automate many of the jobs their parents held in these companies.

We can't change the past, but we should change our public educational system that is failing so many of our children. In the interim, we should work to unseat the public school bureaucracy. That's a whole other discussion.

We should immediately make up for the failure of the public schools by providing low interest rate loans for approved vocational, college and professional educational programs to prepare people for the jobs that are in high demand. Payments on these loans should be deferred while the students are in an active program. For those who successfully complete the educational programs, the loans and accumulated interest should be offset 100% with tax credits they can apply to the income they earn from their new employment. This kind of a system motivates people to change and avoids the liberal socialist solution of free hand outs for votes, as the loan recipients have to complete the programs and earn money to be able to use the tax credits to offset their incomes up to the loan amounts.

The notion that conservatives are mean and unwilling to help those in need is a liberal myth aimed at securing liberals a seat of power at the expense of our children.