Quote:
Originally Posted by Minte
That's the debate..your idea of what's fair and my idea of what's fair is vastly different. The defense budget is a place to start. The real problem is entitlements.
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No, it's not. Entitlements are a symptom, not the problem. The real problem is we have more people willing and able to work than we need to get work done - and they are competing with a combination of mechanized / foreign labor that costs less than any living wage would cost in most of the United States. When you do not have enough quality jobs to support the entire population, cutting the standard of living of the workforce *used to* be the answer. When those cuts are only leading toward a period of less labor required they become a false solution.
You could cut wages, cut entitlements, not supply any kind of health care etc... and the result would still be less workers needed in the future than are needed now. At no point will a worker be cheaper or better than a robot for any form of mundane physical work. At no point will a worker be cheaper or better than a computer for any kind of methodological planning and execution. The only 'jobs' left will be the ones that go to people who are creative enough to design or develop new businesses and products. The so called 'job creators' will be creating jobs for themselves, some bots and a tiny skeleton force of human workers on a global scale.
We have only three possible solutions available:
1 - Cull the population severely. Pandemic plague, war of attrition, massive starvation or something of that sort on a global scale. However, most people would vote to have their own taxes raised instead of erecting death camps to incinerate the poor.
2 - Create new labor intensive tasks that can only be performed by humans. However, that's very unlikely and as the pace of technology always accelerates upon itself even if we did create some new need for human labor we would also quickly find a way to automate it.
3 - Learn to deal with the fact that as many as half the people living on our planet are going to get a 'free ride' on the backs of the half that are able to produce. Their quality of life doesn't need to be anywhere close to what producers enjoy in terms of luxuries, but providing basic necessities and a life above the level of abject poverty is going to be the easiest, cheapest and best solution unless people want to start implementing solution #1 above on a massive scale.
We can produce much more than we need. The notion that everyone has to contribute their maximum output to avoid shortages is simply mistaken. Paying someone to stay home and actually raise their kids, or limiting who can have kids and supplying people with basic distractions from their sorrows for free while producers enjoy luxuries on an unprecedented scale is where we are headed.
