There are a lot of reasons for us being in the shape we are in as a country today, but one of them is we have spent the last 30 years creating a pyramid scheme of useless jobs across the private sector.
For example, we need marketing people, but we do not need nearly as many marketing people as we have people graduating with marketing degrees. However, since we have so many marketing people, when they have the power to do so, they hire more marketing people, who then see the need for more marketing people, and so on and so forth.
The average IT division these days will have more people in digital marketing, project managers, product managers, user experience managers, and so on than they will have software engineers. In fact, they will have several times more. My brother is an electrician, most of the electrical outfits he has worked for in the last few years had more project managers than electricians. Throw on top of those expensive management consultants, marketing consultants, process consultants on so on that companies routinely bring in, despite there being zero evidence they ever make any difference in a company's performance. This kind of crap is true across the private sector these days. You want to know to why the United States has averaged just 2% or so GDP growth for over 10 years now, just look at how most companies are run. In a typical medium to a large company, these days, a third or more of the payroll is utterly useless to the company's performance.
Here in Kansas City, they built a new highrise hotel near the convention center. It took them over 3 years to build it. I have spent a lot of time in China over the last 15 years, in China they would have had that hotel up in 6 months. Here in Kansas City, they are building a new airport terminal, it is scheduled to take 5 years total. In China, they would have it built in just a year to 18 months tops. We are supposed to extend the streetcar/tram line another 5 miles or so. It won't be done until at least 2025. In that time, Shanghai will have easily added over 100 miles of additional subway lines.
Is some of this due to excessive regulation in the United States, sure, but most of it is how companies are structured in the US these days and how they operate. A typical American company these days has far more people generating work for others than they have doing the actual work and to be honest, it only seems to be getting worse.
