Ask the wealthy to pay a little more

Unemployment hasn't been at 10% for the past decade:

http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000

I agree with you about different jobs - jobs and the type of jobs society has changes from time to time. We no longer have blacksmiths but now we have tire shops.

look at how many jobs were 'lost' during the 2008 crash. 500,000 per month for a few months. it seems to me many corps used the crash as an excuse to shed these jobs and focus more on cheap labor overseas. sure people can re-train but with such a huge amount of jobs lost at once, it won't be easy finding a place for everyone as not everyone is re-trainable. some people just aren't too bright and some are stuck in their out of date ways.

Those are not two different problems, they are the same problem. Designing a system that gives people a baseline level they can not fall below and requires them to work for any luxuries they want is the solution to both problems. Having a draconian system that punishes people for being dim, or treats net financial worth as total contribution to society is not helpful and will become less helpful as more people become extras.

I don't get into my personal life on porn boards with any specificity. What I can tell you is that I donate a considerable amount of my time. I find that donating TIME actually does much more than donating money in most instances. Giving $10 to a charity is less helpful than helping out at a food pantry once a month for example in my experience. I have contributed considerable amounts of my time, some money and been active at the local political level (where most policy impact actually originates). It really isn't that hard to give up 1 day a month for a good cause. It doesn't make you a saint, and many people do it... neither for recognition nor reward.

"<10%" = "less than 10%"

I meant it was always less than 10%, during some months it may have been slightly above that, but that's just an anomaly because of business cycles... on average like Robbie pointed out, it's probably actually closer to 5% than 10%....

$13 trillion going into the US economy. You must of got some of that.

You're too blind to see it was mailed to every person in the US.

Go figure out how and come back and join the debate.

Take any bank branch as a simple example. You used to have many tellers, some supervisors, loan officers, mortgage brokers, underwriters, etc etc etc in every branch.

What you have now are a few ATMs, a few very very low level 'suits', a branch manager at each branch and a 'back office' that they all call on the phone with pretty much any question more complex than 'what is my current balance.' You have 1/100th the number of people in good paying 'tier 2' careers and a cheaper 'face time' staff at each branch.

There was a great Sopranos episode where the crew tried to shake down a box store for protection money and the 'manager' explained they don't have any cash, access to any cash and are unable to make any decisions. He also didn't care if they broke windows or burnt the place down because it isn't his store anyway. The 'new jobs' are fixing things that are broken, reporting info up the food chain and acting as a greeter. They are replacing actual careers which are now either automated or brought 'in house' to the 'corporate office' where 1/10th of the people are needed to do them. We are creating new low end jobs and shrinking the number of high end jobs.

You can have 100000000 of people making next to nothing at a call center (often outside the United States), have an automated system answer most calls and allow rare calls up to a tiny tier2 staff instead of paying many people to actually know what they are doing and do it well.

It is a simple fact that less 'labor' is needed to get things done. Less people are needed to get 'everything' done. We are more efficient, we automate more and that pace is quickly accelerating.

Most people don't even go to the bank anymore at all. Direct deposit, iphone apps that let you take a photo of your checks, wire transfers, Paypal, credit cards, online banking... how often do you visit an actual bank? How many people are needed to manage all of that? Almost none compared to what it used to be.

Taxing those that work more, in order to support those that don't work, is one possible solution to the problem, but I don't agree it's the best one. System like that tends to REWARD the lazy / unsuccessful / etc.

You are one of few people that "walk the talk"... I've found that most people love to play armchair philosopher, as long as it's not their time/money on the line...

This thread is like watching the kids on the shortbus debate something. More public cluelessness is hard to find outside a DVTimes thread.

Keep it going, it's hilarious!

Not true. It costs a fortune to put so many people in prison for selling pot. We could legalize it and tax it. That would bring in some revenue, and create a few jobs, but it won't create enough good jobs for all the people who used to make money illegally selling pot at a black market premium. However, when you factor in the cost of prisons, it is CHEAPER to do it even if we have to subsidize their standard of living when they are out of prison.

We waste more money on prisons, emergency care for the uninsured and backward systems like that than we will ever spend on food stamps for poor people. It is a net loss financially to imprison dim people and treat them badly for being dim. It actually costs less to give them food, medications, shelter, clothing and the other basics without requiring them to commit a crime first. When a poor person gets a cold treated at an ER they don't pay anything, but the hospital and insurance companies tag that cost onto the bills of people who actually have insurance by raising rates and premiums. It costs LESS to provide free health clinics set up to handle people and charge zero for doing so.

We should be looking objectively at what is cost effective, efficient and sustainable... rather than emotionally cutting off our own nose to spite our face by making sure nobody gets more than they earn, no matter how dim they are or how little they get.

Opps. When you said "<10%" I thought that was a typo.

Not sure how we jumped on the topic of drug legalization and prisons, but I agree with you there is no reason to keep people in prison for harmless "offenses." I agree with you legalizing of drugs would actually be a good step in the right direction.

You are making it sound like "dim" people are hopeless. I don't think most are. The system they are in taught them helplessness, so we just need to reverse that.

For example, this may not be ideal solution, but each receipient of government aid should have to do free community service... there is no reason why a skilled person like yourself should waste a day helping at a food pantry, when some unemployment "dim" person could perform that same job equally well...

another upside to this is it would filter out the people that are not so "dim", but are lazy instead... those lazy people would likely conclude that working x hours per week to get some government benefits isn't worthwhile, and so hopefully they would realize that they would be better off getting a real job...

It is a perfect example of what I am talking about. Paying billions to imprison people who we give medication, horrible food, terrible shelter and clothing is more expensive than NOT imprisoning millions of people who we give medications, nutritious food and adequate shelter. You pay more tax dollars to sustain prisons than it would cost to sustain the same people in a better quality of life where they could contribute something... or at least not be a negative force in society.

I completely agree. Now we are on common ground. However, working at a food pantry as a dim person wont earn enough to take care of themselves without considerable subsidies from somewhere else. Dim people aren't hopeless, the chance of a dim person 'starting their own company and making themselves successful entrepreneurs' is hopeless.

We need to accept the fact that many people (likely more than half) even when working at their full capacity are not going to be able to find good high paying jobs. The jobs dim people can do are all being automated away. Dim people aren't suddenly going to be retrained to do jobs that Dim people can not do. So we have to either make up jobs that aren't truly needed and subsidize their standard of living, or kill them all.

Even doing all of that is a temporary solution... because we are not too far away from automating the jobs that many bright people do as well. Being a personal accountant is a job a dim person can't do. Any idea how many are out of work thanks to Turbotax? Even the hardest most complex and intelligence requiring jobs will be automated away soon enough. All that will be left is creative jobs, thinking of new things that don't already exist and have not yet been automated. How many people you really think will be employed in that economy? 10%? 1%?... Eventually very few people will have work to do. We are evolving beyond capitalism, not because capitalism is bad... but because we are more productive with every passing day and we simply do not need more than a certain amount of human production.

I'm all for a system that reduces our population. Currently we give many incentives for the people least able raise children, to have the most offspring. That's simply idiotic. Good luck enforcing any of that with the Church as powerful as it remains presently.

Have you noticed that 'hand made' used to mean BETTER and now it often means 'hunk of crap' compared to the commercially automated assembly line version of the same item? That's not because craftsmanship became much worse... it's because automation became infinitely better.

Imagine an accountant who promises to calculate your taxes 'by hand' each year. Chances are his work would be considerably worse than a competitor using a spreadsheet and calculator in 1/00000th the time. There is zero chance his calculations by hand will be better than those that have been automated. The same is true in many fields and that number is growing rapidly.

I have no doubt 'employment' will be 5% in the near future. However the jobs will be split into a small fraction of very high paying jobs and a huge glut of low paying jobs. Employment numbers tell you how many people are doing 'something', they don't tell you what people are doing or earning. The middle class is going bye bye because we do not need many middle level employees. We need plenty of unskilled workers who do grunt work cheap and a small number of people capable of managing huge numbers of unskilled workers. The number of unskilled workers needed will continue decreasing thanks to globalization and further automation. More of the 'good jobs' will also be re-classed as low level jobs too... as they get split up and automated. It's a pyramid that becomes thinner and thinner over time until it looks a lot more like a thin straight vertical line.

We automate away anything in the middle, and the pace is accelerating.