Folks, you ever regret paying off a debt because it makes you lazy and slovenly? Show of hands.

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Some Advice

https://twitter.com/HKesvani/status/1365648166360604675

[T]he F-35 supply chain does not have enough spare parts available to keep aircraft flying enough of the time necessary to meet warfighter requirements. “Several factors contributed to these parts shortages, including F-35 parts breaking more often than expected, and DOD’s limited capability to repair parts when they break.

1970s Was The Inflection Point

https://theweek.com/articles/486362/where-americas-jobs-went

Starting in the 1970s, employers began to shift this balance once again. They became much more politically active than they had been in the mid-century years, and they began to push to limit government regulation on multiple fronts such as the environment, consumer rights, and labor (Hacker and Pierson 2010). As part of this renewed conservative activism, employers ramped up their resistance to established unions and new union organizing. They did so, in part, because they faced a new economic paradigm created by a variety of emerging trends. First, financialization shifted the locus of economic power from manufacturing to banks and investment firms. Second, U.S. corporations, which were the world’s economic leaders in the years after World War II, faced more global competition as countries like Germany and Japan got back on their feet. Third, the rate of profit for private business fell by 29% between 1965 and 1973, and among manufacturers it fell by more than 40% (Brenner 2006). And finally, U.S. employers were more heavily saddled by social welfare costs, like health care and pensions, than were their global competitors because of the U.S.’s employer-based social welfare system (Hacker 2002).

Explaining the erosion of private-sector unions: How corporate practices and legal changes have undercut the ability of workers to organize and bargain - Economic Policy Institute

When did offshoring become so prevalent?

Shareholder Primacy

“In a free-enterprise, private-property system, a corporate executive is an employee of the owners of the business. He has direct responsibility to his employers. That responsibility is to conduct the business in accordance with their desires…the key point is that, in his capacity as a corporate executive, the manager is the agent of the individuals who own the corporation…and his primary responsibility is to them.”

In 2019, Jerry Useem writing in The Atlantic and prominent Democratic Senators Chuck Schumer and Bernie Sanders writing in The New York Times argued that shareholder theory, which promoted a rise in stock-based compensation, has led executives to enrich themselves by implementing stock buybacks—often to the detriment of the companies they work for. The critics argued this diverts company funds away from potentially more profitable or socially valuable avenues, like research and design, reduces productivity, and increases inequality by delivering money to higher-paid employees who receive stock-based compensation and not to lower-paid employees who do not.