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The promise of automation was and still is in its contributions to efficiency and productivity. More can be produced from the same, or the same can be produced from less. Labor-saving devices and techniques were intended to free us, providing us all with more leisure hours and fewer labor hours. More time for family, home, hobbies, sports, and nature. But that only works if patterns if work- and income-sharing are maintained, and they have not been. All of the cost savings have gone to corporate profits. All of the labor savings have been bundled up and dumped onto a few people in the form of full-time unemployment. Instead of rising incomes, they are left with none. They must rely on the scraps of government welfare programs to get by.
And then this small band of wealth-extremists has poisoned the well further by using their large-scale propaganda machinery to convince many among those who are reminded that they are "lucky enough" still to have jobs that those others let go were all lazy and poor decision-makers, rather than that they were industrious and victimized, which would be a great deal closer to the truth.
Look around. Selfish profiteering by the wealth-extremists has not served us well at all and will not suddently start to do so. These people will not be happy until the 50% who do not make enough to owe or pay any federal income tax has become 90%, and perhaps they will not be happy then either.
In those dangerous socialist countries that spend 40-50% of their GDP through the public sector rather than our piddly 20-25% (this would include most other developed economies you can think of), income distributions are such as to assure that the middle class earns enough in wages to be able to afford and pay the taxes needed to support the social programs of the middle class. In this country, only the wealthy can now afford such taxes, and as we can only tax the money, it is the wealthy who will now need to pay those taxes. They have painted theri own selves into this corner, and it is no one else's fault that they now find themselves there.
A solution is just as simple:
Stop producing a replacement worker population (let alone a growing one).
Moderate population levels to align with production capacity and existing development.
This again? Fertility rates are at 90-year lows, and those of your target minority groups are the ones that are falling fastest. Try being at least a two-trick pony for a change.
I'd love to have lived in this country when it had 'only' one hundred million people.
No, you wouldn't. You would hate it. A great many of those who lived at the time and thus had never known anything better hated it also. You wouldn't last a week.
I'm essentially articulating these policies:
1. Focus on high end manufacturing.
2. Corporate management that focuses more on long term gains than short term profits.
3. A better educational system that actually prepares young people for employment.
4. Cooperation of management and unions with the goal of increasing productivity.
We already do #1 because markets have forced us to. Our workers are individually too capable to be used in low-grade manufacturing work that one-time agricultural peasants can be trained over time to do as well as we once did it. We need to and do focus instead on the more complex tasks that they can't do yet.
We have a lot of work to do yet on $2, #3, and #4. We could start by turning off FOX News and the rest of the divisive right-wing disinformation media that for more than 30 years now have done nothing but lie, lie, lie in service to the principle of ever-increasing wealth and power for the already quite wealthy and powerful.
Tax cuts do not increase revenues. Spending and debt are not the problem. Unions are not the enemy (and neither are Muslims or other minorities). The rich are not job-creators. Social Security is not going bankrupt. We turned welfare into workfare a long time ago. CRA did not cause the Great Recession. The minimum wage does not produce inflation or unemployment. Climate change is real and so is the long-form birth certificate, but there never were any WMD.
We need to stop listening to the jerks whose only aim is to saddle and distract us with utter nonsense.
Weak is trying to hide facts in statistics, double speak and straw men.
50% more people in less than 30 years is not any sort of low fertility.
10% more since 2000 alone (308M : 281M) surely isn't.
Go ahead... break down the statistics.
Quote:
Our workers are individually too capable to be used in low-grade manufacturing work...
Well some are. Perhaps even most.
But those people have never been where the problems are. Have they?
The problem lies in what to do about "the others".
And by extension the larger problem is whether growing the capacity and productivity (of the
people who have never been where the problems are) will do anything meaningful for the others.
So far there is nothing I've seen to indicate that it could do anything remotely helpful.
Last edited by MrRational; 07-30-2013 at 09:51 AM..
Weak is trying to hide facts in statistics, double speak and straw men.
Your act is both old and phony. In addition to repulsive. Meanwhile, fertility rates are fertility rates. And bigotry no matter its crude costume is still bigotry. Maybe try to keep all that straight.
2. Corporate management that focuses more on long term gains than short term profits.
.
That would be great, except we'd find a ton of middle class unemployed as their short-term compensation fell. It happens in NYC each time Wall St bonuses are smaller than usual. Rich folks disposable income drives middle class jobs, too.
Still, I'd take middle class layoffs short-term for a better compensation policy, preferably one where bonuses are based on 5 year patterns of increased profitability, with perhaps a teaser (10% of the total outlay) paid out as an "annual bonus advance" in the 2nd through 4th years, 70% paid out after the 5th year.
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