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Stuck: A Root Cause Analysis

By Shlomo Maital  

          Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity.   by Yoni Appelbaum.   Feb. 2025.   

          In Root Cause Analysis  (RCA),   you keep asking questions, until you get to the bottom of the problem.

          How did Trump gain a (small) majority of voters to support his crackpot ideas – now weaking havoc on America and the world?

           Yoni Applebaum is deputy executive editor of The Atlantic, a leading magazine.  His new book offers a root cause explanation.

            The problem is costly housing, which limited mobility, which was the traditional way low-income Americans made more money.

            Here is how it worked.

            Under the Democrats,  America off-shored its manufacturing to Southeast Asia, mainly China.  This hurt the industrial heartland and manufacturing workers, in the Midwest, the South,  and elsewhere.

            In the past, a US worker thrown out of work picked up, packed up, and moved to where there were jobs.

            But because housing became super-expensive, and hard to find (try to find a rental in Boston!),   moving for this group was not an option, because while their wages would rise, they would be more than eaten up by hugely expensive housing.

            Not so for the elites.  A lawyer could leave Alabama, and earn fortunes in New York City, more than enough to cover the housing costs.

           Hence,  Americans, who once were highly mobile, are far less so today.  They are stuck – Stuck in backwater places like Flint, Michigan, once a manufacturing hub, now a slum with water full of lead. 

            The elites (who vote Democrat) have escaped long ago.  The working class are stuck and left behind.

             Hello, Dems?   Are you listening?  Did you see the problem of housing?  Did you do anything?   NO?  

              In November 2024, you paid the piper.