lol, I can't believe you guys don't see this.
first of all, I did a small essay on how computers are making people's lives more miserable, but after thinking about it, it's not the COMPUTER, but really the quickening product cycle.
When we work, we work to help our company beat out the other companies that compete in the same market as us. This CAN lead to products/services becoming:
-cheaper,
-higher quality (though normally that's not the case),
-and released more often.
So, as a result of you working for a company that competes, your effective wages DECREASE becuase of competition (you don't get a big enough raise to compensate for the value of the dollar decreasing), becuase of the above results of competition. if a product/service is cheaper, the company has to sell more units to get the same profit. when you have competition, of course your market it split.
Higher quality, can mean many things. More features in a product/service often occurs (requiring more time to build or create the product/service), but the quality/reliability often goes down to allow profit margins to stay high. So, the company may or may not be recieving the same amount of money as beforehand, but still the value of the dollar plummets.
The kicker is the product cycle. Becuase of competition, cycles become shorter and shorter to out-sell the competition (perfect example nVidia vs 3dfx) with 'new' products. Becuase of this, the amount of money that is made on any one product is reduced considerably, becuase a new product will be out soon which had it's own R&D put into it. Basically the faster products are sold the better, but the faster the product cycle is, the worse for the worker (who consequently is the consumer). So, profit margins DECREASE, and workers get paid less for the SAME amount of work that they would have done in the 1960s (one Full time job would support a family then).
So, you see, it's the SPEED at which the economy moves that reduces the actual money (or rather it's value) that you recieve for an hour's work.
And going further into this, who benefits from this? well the middle class certainly doesn't (they want to buy the latest and greatest, so they spend more, and make less per hour, requiring more hours of work), and the Upper class probably doesn't change too much. so we get a seperation of the classes, which is DEFINETLY not a good thing.
Better yet, Federal Piggy could stop bleeding families dry so that both parents are forced to work just so one of those incomes can pay the taxes.
Russ, I think you need to realize that it isn't the feds (at least, not all the time), it's the competition for things such as being your provider of electricity, health care, and other services/products that are the killers.