I was listening to Dan Carlin talk about the 2012 US elections and he was making the comment that for all the "job creation" rhetoric, there was no discussion of the actual underlying issue for the lack of jobs. He's suggesting that the abysmal job market in the west is a product of globalization, and no politician wants to touch that with a 10 foot pole. Expensive western workers with all their rights and benefits are forced to compete with the 3rd world, and they've been losing for the last generation or so. People do benefit from the cheaper products globalization has brought, but is that enough to compensate for lower wages and a far more competitive job market?

I'm sure the shrinking middle class has to be more complicated than that, but it also seems that introducing cheap 3rd world labor to corporations has had to have some basic supply & demand effects given that the supply of cheap labor is so much more available today than it ever has been. I don't really intend this to become an anti-globalization thread as I believe that it's basically impossible to turn back the clock on globalization...but why IS the middle class shrinking?