I just finished Bait And Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream by Barbara Ehrenreich

New research suggests that 17 percent of jobs that do not require a college degree are currently filled by college graduates, for a total of about seven million under-employed people. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, of the 25 fastest growing jobs for 2006, only five required a college degree at all.

Most of this growth in total labor compensation has been accounted for by rising non-wage payments, like health care and pension benefits. Rapidly rising health care costs and pension funding requirements imply that these higher benefit payments are not translating into increased living standards for workers, but are rather just covering the higher costs of health care and pension funding. Growth in total wage and salary income, the primary source of take-home pay for workers, has actually been negative for private-sector workers: -0.6%, versus the 7.2% gain that is the average increase in private wage and salary income at this point in a recovery.

These are ominous signs, suggesting a new march toward greater inequality in the American economy. Worse, the growth in profits combined with a drop in wage and salary incomes suggest that the recovery has a narrow base, with most American consumers only able to increase their purchasing power through debt. Wage growth is not just fair, it is also necessary for a more sustainable recovery.

Standard & Poor's also expects earnings to continue growing at a double-digit pace in the second half of the year. If those forecasts hold, it would make for the longest stretch of double-digit earnings gains since 1950, surpassing a long string of gains in the early 1990s.

In the first quarter of calendar 2006, corporate profits hit a post World War II high of 12.7 percent of the GDP. The administration projects that profits will be 12.2 percent of GDP for the full year.

In only three other years in the post-war period have corporate profits exceeded 12 percent of the GDP: 1950, 1951 and 1965.

In those other three years, however, corporate income taxes averaged 4.2 percent of the GDP — 65 percent higher than the corporate tax payments expected in fiscal 2006.

My wife and I have been fiscally conservative, but politically, environmentally, educationally ... liberal. I see absolutely no conflict. Environmental health, challenging and open minds, Culture, our children's interest in life, etc. are important. Driving a BMW or SUV, living in a McMansion, eating out every night at a chain restaurant, dressing in GAP, Old Navy, etc. do not add anything to the appreciation of what was the variety of the world. We have both recently quit our jobs. We are part of your statistics - older people not working past 60. We ARE NOT living off HEW. (Federal Dept. of Health Education and Welfare, now known as the Department of Health and Human Services--HHS).

Our jobs had become meaningless. (emphasis added) We both worked in computers, one way or another. The nice thing about computer projects/products is that you can just hit the delete key (or type 'rm' for those using manly operating systems) and clean up your work without impacting a single landfill. But that also meant that we saw nothing really tangible for our day's work. No ditch, no framed wall, no ribbon of asphalt, no scrumptious pastries, no finely machined gizmo, no healthy cat, no soaring aria, no published book ... NADA.

In particular, I also had developed a very cynical perspective of business. I saw managers solely interested in themselves and what they could monetarily get out of anything. I helped start a local office of a high-tech research firm. I was focused on the engineering, the customer, the product. A local companion spent more time promoting himself with the distant management and squeezed a number of us out. I had absolutely no monetary benefit from my Herculean efforts. Management was solely interested in self perpetuation and self aggrandizement and its own bank accounts. It knew nothing about the customer or the product, but management knew everything about bonuses.

I am fascinated by MBAs who graduate and go into business. They know how to balance ledgers, how to improve stock performance. But they know nothing about the product since they short circuited that part of training. They did not grow up in the company but were trained on generic principals and then injected themselves into the management level without ever having been on the manufacturing floor. Using the mantra "Wall street expects", they hide their self-interest in rising stock prices so they can exercise their options.

Employees are now just cogs to the dream of a multi-billion dollar globalized empire. Enough is not enough. I have read stories how after the 1928 crash millionaire company owners invested their own money to shore up confidence in the stock market, but after 9/11 CEOs just gave themselves stock options. The name of the game today is simply immediate self gratifying greed. I have witnessed it where ever I worked.

Also, with defined contribution IRAs, one sees how much money one has saved for retirement. Knowing one's lifestyle one can predict how much one needs to live, assuming Social Security is still available. With available life and health limited, no respect at work and adequate finances to underwrite a reduced lifestyle, one changes his tune from Live-to-Work to Live-to-Live.

So, the lack of rewards at work (meaningful work or involvement), just adequate savings, with the massive fiscal imprudence and disparity- driven Administration, forced chaos and manufactured country-wide and global hostilities = Let's just call it quits.

So, we played the game most of our life. We raised four healthy kids. None of them however went to state universities. We spent our lives giving them an education. Now, our jobs were pointless, our companies served only the management, and the budget and politics of the U.S. has become intentionally divisive, derisive, and greedy. Our lives, our marriage and our curiosity is what we have left and want to cherish. These have no place in the Road-Wage-World we have created. These have no place in the hasty shoving of clown people, driving clown cars eating clown food. We recently visited Guatemala and saw patient people actually working with their hands, touching the world around them. Not working with big iron machines or big fast computers.

Maybe the digital and impersonal chaos around us is part of the pre-octogenarian dropout.