It is still a rational concern. We are already seeing a clear division in our labor force between a small portion of employed society holding highly skilled white collar and technical jobs, and a growing portion relegated to low-paying low-skilled service jobs.
What doe it matter to the American economy that manufacturing jobs exist...OUTSIDE the country and at "slave wages" there? The issue is how this effects our working population HERE.
We have millions of people out of work and a fraction of job apportunities to fight for. We have many millions more working part-time, temporary, and full-time at minimal hours, and most of these are forced to depend on Food Stamps, Medicaid and personal deficit spending (credit cards) to exist day to day and it's not getting any better.
As this kind of division expands, with more and more people entering the job market as our population grows with fewer and fewer job opportunities as corporations seek business development overseas, a crash is highly likely. How radical it becomes remains to be seen.
It will only be a "crash" if our economic system doesn't continue to evolve with technology.
100 years ago, the standard work week was 70 hours a week. If that was still our standard, then we would have a 50% unemployment rate today. Our economic system gradually evolved to meet changes in technology. I have no reason to believe that this will not continue to happen.
I think that the biggest challenge is that the rate of technological improvements is much faster now. Thats means our economic system has to evolve much faster, which means that more thought must be given to it.
There are a few things that happening with our economy that will continue to create job openings for the unemployed, like the change in our demographics with the baby boomers now retiring in mass. That concerns a lot of people because that means that our labor force participation rate will drop, but considering that it has been dropping ever since the year 2000, and considering that it is now still far higher than it was during the 1950s and '60s, thats really not much of a concern. What is a concern is that we have enough jobs in the future so that there is at least one job for every family - otherwise we have to make a decision between mass poverty, or an even more massive welfare state - neither are acceptable alternatives.
What really irks me about conservatives is that so many of them want to take steps that are contrary to our future job needs.
Look at the education forum, and the majority of people saying that we have too many people in college are conservatives. Now if we were having a labor force shortage, particularly for unskilled uneducated jobs, then I would agree with them. But thats not the case - the only areas that we have job shortages are in highly skilled and educated jobs, thus we need lots of people in college.
And conservatives keep pointing out that most of our job growth has been in part time jobs. With our productivity level constantly increasing on a per work hour bases, in the future in order to have sufficient jobs, our average work hours per week actually needs to decrease, so increases in the percent of people working fewer hours a week is actually what we need. What really befuddles me is why so many conservatives suggest that we should eliminate the minimum wage. They claim that low paying jobs are better than no paying jobs, and yes, I get that, but at the same time, aren't part time jobs better than no jobs?
Now as far as some of the the things that we could do to help resolve the problem, they don't have to be drastic, they just need to be at about the same rate that our productivity increases, so that consumption and thus business expansion happens at about the same rate. I'm talking about ensuring that our demand keeps pace with productivity. A few things that we could do to facilitate this are 1) middle class tax cuts so that the middle class can consume more and save more, 2) increases in the minimum wage that would at least keep up with increases in productivity and inflation, 3) a more progressive tax system so that less income and wealth is pooling and more is actively circulating creating real wealth (goods and services). But for some strange reasons, conservatives seem to be against all of these things.