Page 20 THE VILLADOM TIMES I • June 22, 2011 third-generation U.S. veteran, and I’m still waiting for my special Bergen County Veterans Medal to double my miniscule collection. I love this country. If I could afford it, I would gratefully buy American-made shirts and trousers at $100 per garment. Until I get really rich, I expect I’ll just keep on buying the $18 alternatives from elsewhere that I sometimes find in king size catalogs. Then I wait for the zippers to break. They never keep me waiting for long. The funny thing about manufacturing is that it tends to reflect labor costs and foods costs. People who eat meat can’t live on the same pay as people who eat noodles and rice. The economic hardship I sustain by my enormous height – I can’t shop the sales at standard stores -- and by my aversion to polyester have probably prolonged my working life by half a decade or more. If it were not for the fact that certain groups insist on 100 percent natural fibers, I would have long since scratched myself to death. I regard them not only with tolerance, but with a certain sense of gratitude. Category five: computer technicians. Who ever thought that computer technicians would be in over-supply? I would suspect that so many people wanted to do this that they surpassed the market several times over. I would also suspect that doing this over the telephone has opened up whole new vistas of employment to people who live in India or the Philippines, the last two places I spoke to over the phone when I tried to correct my computer problems. When the thing tanks on me now, I call my son. He, at least, is American-made and pays taxes in the same country I do. The message here is that if you are a smart kid or a loving parent you should not rely on any of these job markets for a future of steady employment. Thousands of seamstresses who once thrived were put out of business by the sewing machine, and it’s been all downhill since then in terms of full-time jobs. I think all girls should learn something about sewing, especially if they are lucky enough to learn with Virginia Fawcett of the Needlecraft School, who teaches manners and deportment along with sewing. The ability to style and repair your own clothes may be a more respected job skill in the future economic situation than any of us can (or want to) imagine. My wife wrote an award-winning story because the kids asked her where she learned all that stuff, and she started to explain what it was like to make your own clothes and knit your own socks and sweaters. One of her sweaters led to my son’s debut in acting. I took him with me to view the debut of “Dinomation” at the Morris County Museum. This was a display of moving dinosaurs, mostly about half-size but still pretty enormous. My son wore a reindeer sweater his mother had knitted. He was the youngest spectator there by about 20 years, but he dug it. Noticing the well-dressed kid, a local camera crew approached him and did an interview. “…and here’s the youngest spectator. What did you think of Dinomation?” “Scary!” “Who do you think would want to see it?” “Everybody!” I wish we had asked about a commercial fee. His comments made a number of news shows. He and his sister later posed for about 50 photographs at a Civil War Reenactment Day at Waterloo Village in costumes my daughter Emily had made. That was also memorable. However, constructive fun is not the same thing as job training. I wouldn’t recommend that they go into custom tailoring or acting either. We need to take a calm look at what has happened. The United States has lost a large part of its manufacturing base to less expensive labor elsewhere. The government cannot solve this problem by subsidizing education for people with the taxpayers’ money when the people are being trained for jobs that nobody needs done anymore. What’s wrong with this picture? People demand a subsidized education beyond high school and then demand that the government create jobs so that subsidized education doesn’t go to waste. Just one thing is wrong. The government seems to be going broke every couple of months, and government jobs don’t generate income; they absorb income. We need to restrict taxpayer subsidies to those jobs that really are necessary – medical arts, engineering, environmental sciences, and high-level construction – and stop funding education that doesn’t lead to employment. We need people to do the work the nation needs. The history of post-industrial societies before ours has shown that the most dangerous portion of the population is not the workers or the peasants, but the unemployed intellectuals who can’t find worthwhile jobs and get stuck doing nothing and hating themselves for it. Revolutions are generally fomented by people who have some intelligence, no work, and no likelihood of finding work. Perhaps more to the point, taxpayers should remember how to save money for themselves instead of expecting the government to provide for their every need through a system that leaks all the way to the reservoir by providing jobs for college students who really don’t have any job skills. We need to start becoming America again instead of trying to turn ourselves into a copy of decadent European societies without the culture or tradition to make us interesting to foreign tourists. I recently saw a reference to the jobs that will be less in demand in the future than they have been in the past. We need to examine this list and others like it so we don’t end up subsidizing continued education for personal failure at the public’s expense. Category one: financial consultants. That had to happen sooner or later. When you go to a typical financial consultant, the first thing he or she usually does is show you a graph with the stock market going up and up and tell you how much better you will do in the stock market than you will in CDs or savings accounts. Then he or she will try to sell you a stock. Want to go there? The next thing he or she will do is try to convince you to buy an insurance policy that you just have to have. Guess who gets the commission. The sane things to do – pay off your mortgage if you still have one and put the rest of the money where it is government insured – almost never crop up. The reason is that there is no money to be made for the financial consultant by putting money in the bank instead of in insurance policies or stocks. Category two: business executives. Business is the single most popular major in American colleges today, and kids learn in high school how important it is to be popular. The upshot of this is that colleges educate several times more business executives than the nation will ever need, so they wind up tripping over one another for jobs. The real way to get a job in the business world is to have a concentration in either mathematics or a modern foreign language, but probably not Spanish or Korean since too many native speakers are readily available. Recent graduates who speak Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, or Russian seem to have multiple job offers waiting for them. The trouble is that most schools don’t offer those languages, and are heavily committed to Spanish because they have teachers on hand who can teach Spanish. There’s nothing wrong with Spanish. Graduates are much better off if they’re fluent in Spanish than if they aren’t, but language choices should follow the job market – and the Asian languages are far more likely to lead to employment in executive jobs. Category three: business support. That means secretaries, stenographers, and receptionists. The pressure is such that most people who can’t type their own letters into the computer and print them out and paste stamps on them are not wanted in employment situations because it’s a waste of money to hire an executive and then hire a secretary to do the work for the executive and a stenographer to do the work for the secretary. Most kids today learn how to type before they learn how to write in script. The computer is very forgiving of mistakes if you don’t put your fist through the screen, and “business support” has been devastated by the need to cut costs even if it means more work for the people who actually get the jobs. Category four: garment makers. This is not a big employment factor in Northwest Bergen County, but guess where their jobs all went. Some day when my ship comes in – and it had better be an aircraft carrier or a non-leaking supertanker – I’m going to buy American-made clothes. I’m a Whose job is safe? Maybe no one’s. Letters to the Editor Dear Editor: On behalf of the Midland Board of Recreation, I would like to thank everyone who helped out on Saturday, June 4 during Midland Park Olympic Day. Thanks go to the audio group -- Dan Collins, Chris Gandet, and Saida Kadire; and volunteers Shaina Plowman, Megan Ranges, Dan Aviles, Katie Johnston, Arie Zuidema, Dirk Zuidema, Steve Dombrowski, Melissa Siracusa, Kathy LaMonte, Jenn Sansone, Kathy Piscitello, Ed Gordon, Jerry Mercadante, Ryan Fells, and Big George; and all the members of the board of recreation. Thank you for a job well done. Dave Lancaster, President Midland Park Board of Recreation Dear Editor: The Wyckoff Y would like to thank the hundreds of volunteers and the thousands of participants who made our Second Annual Wyckoff Day so successful. We especially cite Lee Parker (3 Chicas) and his ener- Olympic Day helpers thanked getic committee, who devoted more than nine months to planning this event. The sheer number of details that went into mounting a project of this magnitude and complexity could be counted in the tens of thousands. Among them were contingency plans related to weather, as the Y staff coped with the rain and chill. Well done. Event such as Wyckoff Day, the Triathlon, and our theatrical productions, reflect the Y’s mission of addressing unmet local needs. To everyone who has helped us in our efforts to strengthen our community: Thanks for being there. Our commitment is to continue doing just that. Ron Zier, President Wyckoff YMCA It is the policy of the Villadom TIMES to have a signed copy of letters to the editor in our files. Please fax a signed copy to (201) 670-4745 or drop a signed copy in the mail to Villadom Times, P.O. Box 96, Midland Park, NJ 07432. Signed letters may also be dropped off at our office located at 333 Godwin Avenue in Midland Park. Thank you. Support led to success