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Thread: holiday weekend commentary - 'Labor Day 2012 - The Future of Work'

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    Default holiday weekend commentary - 'Labor Day 2012 - The Future of Work'

    this commentary touches on a theme that has been discussed in several past threads ...

    from our 'old friend' Charles Hughes Smith at


    (snip)"What better day to ponder the future of work than Labor Day? Long-time correspondent Robert Z. recently shared an essay on just this topic entitled Understanding the 'New' Economy.

    The underlying political and financial assumption of the Status Quo is that technology will ultimately create more jobs than it destroys. Bob's insightful essay disputes that assumption:


    Over the past 15 years, the global economy has experienced structural changes to a degree not seen in nearly 150 years. Put simply, the Industrial Revolution of the 1800s has given way to a post-industrial economy. In this post-industrial economy, technology has now evolved to the point where it destroys more jobs than it creates.
    Still, most people are Luddites to some extent. Human nature is to resist dramatic change, either actively or passively, until we have no other choice. If you don’t believe that, just listen to our presidential candidates.

    Both Mitt Romney and Barack Obama will give us happy talk about maintaining entitlement benefits (e.g., Medicare and Medicaid) that cannot possibly be sustained. They will talk about energy self-sufficiency. They will talk about creating jobs. They will tell us that we can somehow ‘grow’ our way out of our economic distress. But neither candidate will admit that technology now destroys more jobs than it creates, because to do so would be to commit political suicide. The fact is that none of the happy talk will ever come true. Instead, the Federal Government, with the tacit approval of both major political parties, continues to run trillion-dollar-plus deficits year after year in a futile attempt to spend our way out of our economic problems and to sustain an economic model that cannot be sustained.

    Those who believe that bringing manufacturing back to the US will also bring back jobs are trying to fight a war that has already been fought and lost. Why? The answer is technology. It’s actually a fairly simple process now to bring production of many items back to the US, simply because of automation and robotics. A factory filled with robots can operate 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year, so long as the raw material inputs keep flowing into the factory. Robots don’t take breaks, don’t make mistakes, don’t call in sick, don’t take vacations, don’t require expensive health insurance, and don’t receive paychecks. A fully automated robotic manufacturing facility might require only 100 workers, while a traditional assembly line facility might utilize 3,000 workers. That’s a huge difference in the number of jobs. The simple fact is that most of the lost manufacturing jobs are never coming back.

    What about all the marketing, administrative, accounting, and IT jobs that we think can’t be outsourced or automated? Well, retail enterprises now tailor any number of special offers directly to individual customers by mining data from reward programs. That doesn’t take an expensive ad budget or a huge marketing department, since it’s all automated. Have you ever noticed that most of the advertising you see while you surf the Web is tailored to things you might be interested in buying? That’s all automated – huge numbers of marketing professionals are just not needed.

    In the accounting world, ‘lean accounting’ attempts to streamline accounting processes and eliminate accounting inefficiencies. A byproduct of ‘lean accounting’ is often greater use of technology and a significant reduction in the number of accountants and accounting clerks. In the IT (Information Technology) sector, computer algorithms for high-frequency stock trading (HFT) have become so complex that specialized software now writes new HFT programs and algorithms. That reduces job opportunities for programmers. The net result of all these examples is not job creation. It’s job destruction.

    How about government jobs and government-related jobs? Well, think about the US defense budget. It’s a huge example. We surely do not need as many tanks and fighter jets as we used to, now that we have remote-controlled drones to do many of the jobs required. And with the availability of these drones, we might not need as many aircraft carriers, ships, or military personnel either.

    What about the Post Office? Do we really need daily mail service in an electronic world?

    The point is that as we let go of old methodologies, whether in the private sector or in government, huge numbers of jobs simply disappear. As a society, we need to admit that ‘free-market’ capitalism is not going to bring back these lost jobs. Thanks to technology, society is capable of meeting basic human needs (food, clothing, shelter, transportation) with far fewer workers percentage-wise than were needed in the past. But as a society, we also need to admit that socialistic solutions won’t work either, simply because human nature is to take care of ourselves and our families first. Once we have provided for ourselves and our families, very few of us are both willing and able to provide for every stranger that might knock on our door seeking assistance.

    As a nation, we must at some point address any number of major economic issues, including the massive overhang of debt (public and private) that cannot possibly be repaid and demands for future entitlement payments that cannot possibly be met. As a society, we ought to admit that we cannot borrow our way to prosperity. Unless interest rates are zero forever and creditors are willing to forego scheduled repayments forever, borrowing our way to prosperity is a mathematical impossibility.

    One point is certain. Even if we find the political will to deal with the mathematics of our economic problems, we will never find long-term solutions to our economic issues until we recognize the profound economic changes wrought by technological advances. This is especially true with respect to our traditional view of a job and a paycheck. While it is true that new opportunities will always exist, these opportunities may not be as plentiful as the jobs of the past once were. And these opportunities will generally require more advanced skills than many of the jobs of the past. Technology has fundamentally changed the nature of paying work, and it is also one of the major economic issues of our time.

    About the author:
    Bob Z., of Vancouver, Washington, is a Corporate Finance executive who retired in 2007 from an upper management position with a Fortune 500 corporation.


    Thank you, Bob, for your forthright appraisal of technology and jobs. The decline in labor's share of the GDP (gross domestic product) is sobering:



    Here are some other points to consider:

    1. The build-out of a new technology creates a large but temporary number of jobs. This has been the case for some time: the construction of the railroads created a jobs boom that soon disappeared in a financial bust as rail was over-built and profits were non-existent for many of the extraneous or duplicate lines.

    Telephony and telecom followed similar arcs, and did the build-out of the Internet infrastructure.

    2. Technology maturation leads to diminishing return on labor as incremental advances in productivity are capital-intensive. Semiconductor manufacturing is a good example; fabrication facilities (fabs) cost upwards of $2 billion each even as the number of workers need to operate the fab declines. Profit margins on many high-technology products are razor-thin, flat-screen displays being a prime example, and diminishing margins further pressure labor costs.

    3. Software is leading the next-generation industrial revolution, automating many tasks that were considered "safe" from automation. As Bob pointed out, this includes securities trading and accounting. (I would add tax preparation for the majority of tax situations.) Can the law, academia and government remain immune? Unlikely.

    4. Although few dare contemplate this, the low-hanging fruit of technology may have already been plucked. Take healthcare as an example: antibiotics and vaccines virtually eliminated many diseases at a very low cost per dose (though some diseases are coming back due to unvaccinated host populations and bacterial adaptation).

    Antibiotics are "one size fits all" technologies: they act basically the same on every target bacteria and in every host. Compare that universality to the spectrum of individual responses to cancer treatments and other medications: one size does not fit all, and many of the most profitable drugs of the past few decades treated symptoms, not the underlying illness.

    It is increasingly clear that there is no "magic pill" that kills all cancers, or even specific cancers in all patients. Lifestyle diseases such as diabetes appear impervious to "magic bullet" cures, as the causal factors of the disease are complex. The same can be said of diseases of aging and environmental factors.

    In other words, the notion that tens of billions of dollars in high-tech research will yield "one size fits all" low-cost treatments of complex diseases has been shown to be problematic, and very possibly a fantasy.

    5. The Internet is destroying vast income streams that once supported tens of thousands of jobs in industries from finance to music. Craigslist has gutted the once-immense income stream from newspapers, and web-based marketing has shredded print-media advert page counts. Global competition and pressure to maintain profits and margins relentlessly drive enterprises to slash payrolls.

    6. As I have discussed here many times over the years, the rising costs of taxes, benefits and regulations have squeezed small businesses. In response, many small companies rely on automation and software to perform tasks that until recently required a human worker.

    Those small businesses that cannot prosper via technology are going under, and the risks posed by ever-higher costs have raised entry barriers to starting a small business"

    The array of web-based tools available to entrepreneurs now is astonishing. Why take on the risks of hiring people when you can do the work yourself with low-cost web tools and software? For many small enterprises, that is the only way to survive.

    Advanced societies face a dilemma that cannot be solved by more debt or more technology: how to distribute not just the output of the economy, but the work and responsibility so that everyone has an opportunity to contribute and earn their keep. (snip)

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    Default Re: holiday weekend commentary - 'Labor Day 2012 - The Future of Work'

    ^^^ for the benefit of readers who aren't Dollar Den 'regulars', the point in question is the American economy's actual need for unskilled labor ... and beyond that the American economy's need for unskilled labor at a gov't mandated cost of $7.50 per hour PLUS 7.65% employer SSI / medicare contribution PLUS ~5% unemployment insurance premium PLUS 7% disability insurance premium ... which from the US employer's standpoint adds up to something in excess of $10 an hour ... is rapidly declining. As the above commentary briefly mentions, this cost level for unskilled US labor has already pushed many US businesses out of business. Where possible, it has pushed many US businesses to outsource work to much lower cost Asian production facilities. Similarly, this cost level for US unskilled labor has pushed many US companies FORMERLY heavily dependent on unskilled labor, from retail to agriculture to warehousing, to make major capital investments to purchase automated equipment that permanently reduces their future need for US unskilled workers. In combination, this leads to a conclusion that America has undergone a paradigm shift where its 20+ percent ( of total working age population ) unemployed unskilled workers are likely to remain unemployed on a permanent basis.

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    Default Re: holiday weekend commentary - 'Labor Day 2012 - The Future of Work'

    Quote Originally Posted by Melonie View Post
    ^^^ for the benefit of readers who aren't Dollar Den 'regulars', the point in question is the American economy's actual need for unskilled labor ... and beyond that the American economy's need for unskilled labor at a gov't mandated cost of $7.50 per hour PLUS 7.65% employer SSI / medicare contribution PLUS ~5% unemployment insurance premium PLUS 7% disability insurance premium ...
    You just make things up. Unemployment insurance in the US is not 5% of an employees wage. FUTA, the federal unemployment insurance is .8% of the first $7,000 of each employee's annual wage. The state portion varies by state, but in North Carolina, a relatively expensive state, it is 2.7% of the first $7,000 of an employee's annual wage. Social Security is 6.2% of the first $110,100 of an employee's annual wage. Medicare is 1.49% of the employee's annual wage. Thus, as employee makes more, his tax cost decreases substantially.

    I have no idea what you are talking about with "PLUS 7% disability insurance premium...." No state in the United States has a mandatory disability insurance system, nor does the federal government. What every state has and the federal government for certain employers is a workers compensation system to cover injuries on the job. You neglected to even mention workers compensation. The premium for workers compensation varies by state, from a low of 1.02% in North Dakota to 3.33% in Montana. The median for all 50 states is 2.04%.

    HTH
    Z

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    Default Re: holiday weekend commentary - 'Labor Day 2012 - The Future of Work'

    ^^^ actually where New York is concerned, I was generous. State unemployment insurance premiums for NY employers typically begin at 4.1% but can run as high as 9.9%. Add the federal and you're right at my 5% figure. Google it yourself if you don't believe me. Granted that the annual earnings ceiling is $8,500 ... meaning that the employer insurance premium burden, expressed as a percentage of total employee labor cost, is significantly lower for a highly skilled highly paid professional than for a minimum wage employee. But this thread's focus is unskilled labor.

    As to disability insurance not being mandatory ... from SBA website

    (snip)"Some states require employers to provide partial wage replacement insurance coverage to their eligible employees for non-work related sickness or injury. Currently, if your employees are located in any of the following states, you are required to purchase disability insurance:
    •California: Employment Development Department
    •Hawaii: Unemployment Insurance Division
    •New Jersey: Department of Labor and Workforce Development
    •New York: New York State Workers' Compensation Board
    •Puerto Rico: Departamento del Trabajo y Recursos Humanos/Department of Labor and Human Resources
    •Rhode Island: Rhode Island Department of Labor and Training"(snip)

    In New York any business which employs one or more employees for 30 days or more per year MUST provide state disability insurance coverage. And that NY state disability insurance coverage MUST cover disability resulting from accidents occurring both on and off the job ! Between the worker's comp insurance premium component and the wage replacement insurance premium component, the rate can indeed run 7% for minimum wage workers. Granted that large established businesses usually self-insure for wage replacement, but that does not eliminate the actual cost.

    Count yourself lucky that North Carolina is not as 'insane' in regard to mandated employee benefit costs as NY and the other states listed above. But please refrain from parroting the 'you're making things up' claims without additional research just because the specific details don't precisely match business friendly North Carolina's particular state laws and mandates.
    Last edited by Melonie; 09-04-2012 at 05:47 PM.

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    Default Re: holiday weekend commentary - 'Labor Day 2012 - The Future of Work'

    Quote Originally Posted by Melonie View Post
    this commentary touches on a theme that has been discussed in several past threads ...

    from our 'old friend' Charles Hughes Smith at http://www.oftwominds.com/blogsept12...-work8-12.html


    (snip)"What better day to ponder the future of work than Labor Day? Long-time correspondent Robert Z. recently shared an essay on just this topic entitled Understanding the 'New' Economy.

    The underlying political and financial assumption of the Status Quo is that technology will ultimately create more jobs than it destroys. Bob's insightful essay disputes that assumption:


    Over the past 15 years, the global economy has experienced structural changes to a degree not seen in nearly 150 years. Put simply, the Industrial Revolution of the 1800s has given way to a post-industrial economy. In this post-industrial economy, technology has now evolved to the point where it destroys more jobs than it creates.
    Still, most people are Luddites to some extent. Human nature is to resist dramatic change, either actively or passively, until we have no other choice. If you don’t believe that, just listen to our presidential candidates.

    Both Mitt Romney and Barack Obama will give us happy talk about maintaining entitlement benefits (e.g., Medicare and Medicaid) that cannot possibly be sustained. They will talk about energy self-sufficiency. They will talk about creating jobs. They will tell us that we can somehow ‘grow’ our way out of our economic distress. But neither candidate will admit that technology now destroys more jobs than it creates, because to do so would be to commit political suicide. The fact is that none of the happy talk will ever come true. Instead, the Federal Government, with the tacit approval of both major political parties, continues to run trillion-dollar-plus deficits year after year in a futile attempt to spend our way out of our economic problems and to sustain an economic model that cannot be sustained.

    Those who believe that bringing manufacturing back to the US will also bring back jobs are trying to fight a war that has already been fought and lost. Why? The answer is technology. It’s actually a fairly simple process now to bring production of many items back to the US, simply because of automation and robotics. A factory filled with robots can operate 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year, so long as the raw material inputs keep flowing into the factory. Robots don’t take breaks, don’t make mistakes, don’t call in sick, don’t take vacations, don’t require expensive health insurance, and don’t receive paychecks. A fully automated robotic manufacturing facility might require only 100 workers, while a traditional assembly line facility might utilize 3,000 workers. That’s a huge difference in the number of jobs. The simple fact is that most of the lost manufacturing jobs are never coming back.

    What about all the marketing, administrative, accounting, and IT jobs that we think can’t be outsourced or automated? Well, retail enterprises now tailor any number of special offers directly to individual customers by mining data from reward programs. That doesn’t take an expensive ad budget or a huge marketing department, since it’s all automated. Have you ever noticed that most of the advertising you see while you surf the Web is tailored to things you might be interested in buying? That’s all automated – huge numbers of marketing professionals are just not needed.

    In the accounting world, ‘lean accounting’ attempts to streamline accounting processes and eliminate accounting inefficiencies. A byproduct of ‘lean accounting’ is often greater use of technology and a significant reduction in the number of accountants and accounting clerks. In the IT (Information Technology) sector, computer algorithms for high-frequency stock trading (HFT) have become so complex that specialized software now writes new HFT programs and algorithms. That reduces job opportunities for programmers. The net result of all these examples is not job creation. It’s job destruction.

    How about government jobs and government-related jobs? Well, think about the US defense budget. It’s a huge example. We surely do not need as many tanks and fighter jets as we used to, now that we have remote-controlled drones to do many of the jobs required. And with the availability of these drones, we might not need as many aircraft carriers, ships, or military personnel either.

    What about the Post Office? Do we really need daily mail service in an electronic world?

    The point is that as we let go of old methodologies, whether in the private sector or in government, huge numbers of jobs simply disappear. As a society, we need to admit that ‘free-market’ capitalism is not going to bring back these lost jobs. Thanks to technology, society is capable of meeting basic human needs (food, clothing, shelter, transportation) with far fewer workers percentage-wise than were needed in the past. But as a society, we also need to admit that socialistic solutions won’t work either, simply because human nature is to take care of ourselves and our families first. Once we have provided for ourselves and our families, very few of us are both willing and able to provide for every stranger that might knock on our door seeking assistance.

    As a nation, we must at some point address any number of major economic issues, including the massive overhang of debt (public and private) that cannot possibly be repaid and demands for future entitlement payments that cannot possibly be met. As a society, we ought to admit that we cannot borrow our way to prosperity. Unless interest rates are zero forever and creditors are willing to forego scheduled repayments forever, borrowing our way to prosperity is a mathematical impossibility.

    One point is certain. Even if we find the political will to deal with the mathematics of our economic problems, we will never find long-term solutions to our economic issues until we recognize the profound economic changes wrought by technological advances. This is especially true with respect to our traditional view of a job and a paycheck. While it is true that new opportunities will always exist, these opportunities may not be as plentiful as the jobs of the past once were. And these opportunities will generally require more advanced skills than many of the jobs of the past. Technology has fundamentally changed the nature of paying work, and it is also one of the major economic issues of our time.

    About the author:
    Bob Z., of Vancouver, Washington, is a Corporate Finance executive who retired in 2007 from an upper management position with a Fortune 500 corporation.


    Thank you, Bob, for your forthright appraisal of technology and jobs. The decline in labor's share of the GDP (gross domestic product) is sobering:



    Here are some other points to consider:

    1. The build-out of a new technology creates a large but temporary number of jobs. This has been the case for some time: the construction of the railroads created a jobs boom that soon disappeared in a financial bust as rail was over-built and profits were non-existent for many of the extraneous or duplicate lines.

    Telephony and telecom followed similar arcs, and did the build-out of the Internet infrastructure.

    2. Technology maturation leads to diminishing return on labor as incremental advances in productivity are capital-intensive. Semiconductor manufacturing is a good example; fabrication facilities (fabs) cost upwards of $2 billion each even as the number of workers need to operate the fab declines. Profit margins on many high-technology products are razor-thin, flat-screen displays being a prime example, and diminishing margins further pressure labor costs.

    3. Software is leading the next-generation industrial revolution, automating many tasks that were considered "safe" from automation. As Bob pointed out, this includes securities trading and accounting. (I would add tax preparation for the majority of tax situations.) Can the law, academia and government remain immune? Unlikely.

    4. Although few dare contemplate this, the low-hanging fruit of technology may have already been plucked. Take healthcare as an example: antibiotics and vaccines virtually eliminated many diseases at a very low cost per dose (though some diseases are coming back due to unvaccinated host populations and bacterial adaptation).

    Antibiotics are "one size fits all" technologies: they act basically the same on every target bacteria and in every host. Compare that universality to the spectrum of individual responses to cancer treatments and other medications: one size does not fit all, and many of the most profitable drugs of the past few decades treated symptoms, not the underlying illness.

    It is increasingly clear that there is no "magic pill" that kills all cancers, or even specific cancers in all patients. Lifestyle diseases such as diabetes appear impervious to "magic bullet" cures, as the causal factors of the disease are complex. The same can be said of diseases of aging and environmental factors.

    In other words, the notion that tens of billions of dollars in high-tech research will yield "one size fits all" low-cost treatments of complex diseases has been shown to be problematic, and very possibly a fantasy.

    5. The Internet is destroying vast income streams that once supported tens of thousands of jobs in industries from finance to music. Craigslist has gutted the once-immense income stream from newspapers, and web-based marketing has shredded print-media advert page counts. Global competition and pressure to maintain profits and margins relentlessly drive enterprises to slash payrolls.

    6. As I have discussed here many times over the years, the rising costs of taxes, benefits and regulations have squeezed small businesses. In response, many small companies rely on automation and software to perform tasks that until recently required a human worker.

    Those small businesses that cannot prosper via technology are going under, and the risks posed by ever-higher costs have raised entry barriers to starting a small business"

    The array of web-based tools available to entrepreneurs now is astonishing. Why take on the risks of hiring people when you can do the work yourself with low-cost web tools and software? For many small enterprises, that is the only way to survive.

    Advanced societies face a dilemma that cannot be solved by more debt or more technology: how to distribute not just the output of the economy, but the work and responsibility so that everyone has an opportunity to contribute and earn their keep. (snip)
    One proposed solution is greater use of "job-sharing" which frankly makes me nervous. VOLUNTARY job-sharing is fine as far as it goes but how do you get beyond that ? How do you even formulate a tax credit to encourage employers to facilitate it or otherwise create incentives beyond the naturally occurring ones ? - stay at home mom only wants to work part-time ; so does the retiree and the college student etc..

    As for Point Number "4" supra, that is A reason why we need more research on what works for how many people in medicine and pharmacology. Especially as Medicare and Medicaid are going broke. We need to take a hard look at things like cancer treatments and a lot of other things to determine whether they are sufficiently cost-effective.

    All that being said, I don't know if things are really as "doomy and gloomy" as some might think. History is a story of progress and old technologies giving way to the new with resulting dislocation and even hardship until humankind sufficiently adjusts and adapts. The sad part , to me at least, is the large segment of our population that is totally unequipped to adjust and adapt. Particularly those who didn't finish high school , got pregnant without being married and didn't stay out of jail. We are going to have to figure out a way to utilize them productively somehow , some way.

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    Default Re: holiday weekend commentary - 'Labor Day 2012 - The Future of Work'

    The sad part , to me at least, is the large segment of our population that is totally unequipped to adjust and adapt

    We are going to have to figure out a way to utilize them productively somehow , some way.

    Good luck with that one. Past 'solutions' such as a military draft to 'feed' a high casualty rate war are clearly off the table. So are alternate solutions such as 'Gulags'. In today's America, citizens have a legal right to refuse work which they don't want to do in locations where they don't want to live ... and still be provided with food, shelter, medical care, 'beer money' etc. There's always the next strain of 'bird flu' I suppose, which conspiracy theorists would tell you is already being genetically engineered in some clandestine laboratory.

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    Default Re: holiday weekend commentary - 'Labor Day 2012 - The Future of Work'

    Quote Originally Posted by Melonie View Post
    (snip)"Some states require employers to provide partial wage replacement insurance coverage to their eligible employees for non-work related sickness or injury. Currently, if your employees are located in any of the following states, you are required to purchase disability insurance:
    •California: Employment Development Department
    •Hawaii: Unemployment Insurance Division
    •New Jersey: Department of Labor and Workforce Development
    •New York: New York State Workers' Compensation Board
    •Puerto Rico: Departamento del Trabajo y Recursos Humanos/Department of Labor and Human Resources
    •Rhode Island: Rhode Island Department of Labor and Training"(snip)
    You are right about one thing, NY does have mandatory disability insurance. How much it costs, not much. The maximum benefit period is 26 weeks and it pays half of the employees average weekly wage up to $170.00 per week. My insurance guy told me the maximum I'd pay in NY is about $3.00 per week assuming all my employees were earning twice the maximum benefit and I can recover up to $.60 per week from each employee. That just doesn't add much to the cost of having employees in New York. Otherwise, New York's workers comp is not too high. Nothing like Alaska's or Montana's at just over 3% of payroll.

    Z

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    Default Re: holiday weekend commentary - 'Labor Day 2012 - The Future of Work'

    Quote Originally Posted by Melonie View Post
    Good luck with that one. Past 'solutions' such as a military draft to 'feed' a high casualty rate war are clearly off the table. So are alternate solutions such as 'Gulags'. In today's America, citizens have a legal right to refuse work which they don't want to do in locations where they don't want to live ... and still be provided with food, shelter, medical care, 'beer money' etc. There's always the next strain of 'bird flu' I suppose, which conspiracy theorists would tell you is already being genetically engineered in some clandestine laboratory.
    Melonie - You kinow I love you . I'm willing to have your baby lol and we certainly agree on a lot of stuff but your latest troubles me. Are you really that pessimistic ? There's almost something fascistic in the realpolitick which you have expressed. I hope you are not advocating war , or gulags, or epidemics. You remind me of Scrooge's line from a " Christmas Carol ". When told by two gentlemen soliciting holiday contributions for a relief fund for the London poor that many cannot go to the poorhouses and others would rather die than do so , Scrooge replies : "Let them get on with it and decrease the surplus population."

    I, for one, am NOT willing to write off a substantial segment of our population. Who says they have a "right" to refuse work ? Or a right to be a public charge ? I'm not aware of anything in the Constitution supporting a right of subsidized idleness . I've repeatedly proposed ways to improve education and to stop subsidizing illegitimacy.
    Who says that we can't say : "Work or starve" to the able bodied ? The statistics are crystal clear and have been developed at liberal bastions like Princeton and Harvard. If you want to avoid a life of poverty, do not have an illegitimate child, finish high school, stay out of jail and don't get married before turning 21. You are almost guaranteed not to be "poor" if you do those things. If you do just one, the odds are overwhelming that you will live a life in poverty. Do more than one and it's almost a 100% guarantee. Where is the public service ad campaign explaining this ? Why can't we hammer this into the skulls filled with mush in our public schools ? Could it be that the "poverty industry" and arguable the "poverty party" do not want any such thing ? That they want to perpetuate poverty ? It certainly seems that way.

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    Default Re: holiday weekend commentary - 'Labor Day 2012 - The Future of Work'

    but your latest troubles me. Are you really that pessimistic ? There's almost something fascistic in the realpolitick which you have expressed. I hope you are not advocating war , or gulags, or epidemics. You remind me of Scrooge's line from a " Christmas Carol ". When told by two gentlemen soliciting holiday contributions for a relief fund for the London poor that many cannot go to the poorhouses and others would rather die than do so , Scrooge replies : "Let them get on with it and decrease the surplus population."

    Obviously I'M not advocating such actions. However, there ARE some who do !!!! Malthus' 'useless eaters' view certainly still has its present day advocates ... from American Thinker ...

    (snip)" under the terms of the section, the federal government can compel more frequent end-of-life sessions if it declares a "significant change" in the health of the Medicare recipient, a change that the bill does not confine to fatal illness, but which encompasses broad and abstract conditions described as "chronic," "progressive," or "life-limiting." The bill even empowers physicians to make an "actionable medical order" to "limit some or all specified interventions..." In effect, the government can determine that a "life-limiting" condition demands the withholding of treatment.

    The bill puts the Secretary of Health in charge of life and death decisions coming out of these sessions. Under the heading, "QUALITY REPORTING INITIATIVE," the bill says, "For purposes of reporting data on quality measures for covered professional services furnished during 2011 and any subsequent year, to the extent that measures are available, the Secretary shall include quality measures on end of life care and advanced care planning that have been adopted or endorsed by a consensus-based organization, if appropriate. Such measures shall measure both the creation of and adherence to orders for life-sustaining treatment."

    These measures are merely an extension of the healthcare provisions hidden in the stimulus bill, which contained alarming new guidelines that required medical practitioners to judge whether or not treating certain patients was "comparatively effective." These decisions were to be based on the findings of a presidential advisory council on the costs of varying treatments. As a result of these changes, treatment is now a question of "cost" and humans are viewed as potential "liabilities" instead of patients."(snip)


    I point out the above in response to your earlier implication that such a position is 'fascistic'. Indeed it IS ... but that doesn't mean that a gov't needs to be openly fascist in order to follow certain aspects of Malthus' position. Arguably, the UK has progressed from the poorhouses of Dickens' day to rationed National Health Care ... obviously a much more 'civilized' institution but arguably fulfilling a similar purpose.

    If you want the ugly truth about my own personal position, it is this. Human history shows that for thousands of years the 'uber-rich' and politically powerful have NEVER voluntarily shared their wealth and power. It is thus no surprise to discover that today's prime advocate of Malthus' theories is none other than the Council on Foreign Relations ... but we'll leave further discussions along those lines for conspiracy novelists. Human history also shows that for thousands of years, with one glaring exception, there has arguably never been a period spanning three generations where a natural disaster ( bubonic plague, influenza ) or major wars with high casualties, or deliberate gov't policy resulting in the 'elimination' of certain citizens, hasn't significantly 'thinned the herd' to the point of making labor a scarce resource. The exception of course was early Imperial China ... was arguably made possible by the huge amount of undeveloped land available ... and arguably abruptly ended in 'civil' war casualties as soon as all of the undeveloped land was 'spoken for'.


    Who says that we can't say : "Work or starve" to the able bodied ?
    hmmm ... a majority of voters who don't actually have to pay income taxes to feed / house those not working ? ... politicians and judges who have decided to remove the 'work' requirement from social welfare benefit eligibility ? ... mainstream news media who give the 'poverty industry' a free microphone ?

    Actually, the larger question is what would you have millions of unskilled Americans do in regard to work ? Divide them in half, let the first half dig holes and the second half fill the holes back in again ? The fact remains that the US / developed world economy has now moved beyond the point where unskilled labor costing a minimum of $7.50 an hour remains economically viable in any situation where the option to automate, import or outsource exists. So where do you turn for a solution ? Close down US borders to imports and outsourcing, leaving US businesses no option but to utilize $7.50 an hour labor ( which in turn will result in major price increases in 'lowest cost option' products thus lowering the standard of living of both poor and middle class Americans ) ? Print enough US dollars out of thin air such that a US $7.50 per hour labor cost becomes nearly equal to unskilled labor costs in China / Vietnam etc ( which in turn will result in lowering the standard of living for ALL Americans via $10 per gallon gasoline and $5 loaf of bread ) ?

    As an anecdotal example, one of my relatives still living in New York informed me of a new policy by the local city school district now that the new school year has started. They have elected to use federal educational grant money to provide 'free' lunches to ALL students. This was based on the fact that 73% of school students are currently eligible for 'free' lunches, with another 12% of school students being eligible for 'reduced price' lunches, under existing gov't programs ... leaving only 15% of school students being required to pay full price for their own lunch. The stated reason for offering 'free' school lunches to all students was that the 'incremental' cost was minor given that only 15% of students were currently ineligible for 'free' or subsidized lunches under existing programs, but more importantly that the school providing 'free' lunches to all students would remove any possibility of students from 'poor' families being treated differently than students from 'rich' families ... or, stated differently, that no stigma whatoever should be attached to people receiving gov't benefits, and no pride should be accorded to people paying their own way.

    Ultimately, the bottom line is determined by the basic math of productivity versus consumption. That equation has been out of balance for two generations, financed by growing mountains of private and gov't debt. Much of Europe has already hit the wall in regard to their ability to obtain additional debt financing. The US is obviously behind europe on the debt curve, but is absolutely following the same trajectory. Thus America's likely answer will probably be very similar to that of Greece, Spain etc. At some point, when 'foreign' lenders decide that they do not want to continue lending money to spendthrift countries whose ability / willingness to repay is declining, and where the probability of being repaid in 'devalued' currency is rising, the gov'ts of said spendthrift countries will run out of funds to continue providing 'free lunches' ... literally and figuratively.
    Last edited by Melonie; 09-07-2012 at 03:04 PM.

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