Ryan Cooper 
Ryan Cooper is a national correspondent at TheWeek.com. His work has appeared in the Washington Monthly, The New Republic, and the Washington Post.
Posted on 09/09/2014 11:43:55 AM PDT by DannyTN
The politics of a guaranteed income get a lot easier when you acknowledge that the U.S. is no longer the land of opportunity
...
However, there are other trends that may be interacting with and exacerbating this original sin. Automation and globalization had already largely hollowed out America's manufacturing employment base; most jobs created during this "recovery" have been in crappy low-wage work. And when one takes automation to its obvious logical end, it's hard not to conclude that robots will soon be putting just about everyone out of a job.
... As someone with a nice, stimulating job, I agree that work can help people flourish. But in an economy that is flatly failing to produce enough jobs to satisfy the need, a universal basic income will start to seem more plausible — even necessary.
(Excerpt) Read more at theweek.com ...
I believe there is a need for assistance. I’m not looking to kill people. I’m merely telling folks who are able to work, to go out and work.
Giving them two years to ween themselves from assistance is sufficient. I would agree to extend it by a bit, but I want Welfare mostly gone in three to five years, dead certain.
I’m not willing to let people die when our own government has let China steal our industries.
But government needs to reverse course and restore the import tariffs, because everyone not working is not sustainable. Our people needs jobs, and our country needs industries that it can count on in times of war.
Devious!
I'm not sure it's just liberal policies. At one time the Republicans were protectionists and supported the tariffs and the liberals were against them. But then unions took up the protectionist cry and conservatives turned against the tariffs. There is an awful lot of Milton Friedman worship on this board. Worse among the libertarians.
I'm not sure it's just liberal policies. At one time the Republicans were protectionists and supported the tariffs and the liberals were against them. But then unions took up the protectionist cry and conservatives turned against the tariffs. There is an awful lot of Milton Friedman worship on this board. Worse among the libertarians.
There are occasionally real jobs posted on Craigslist, I have actually landed three real jobs there and am still working part time at one of them. As for Monster and the others I really can’t figure out what the purpose for them is. One thing is for certain there are many, many listings of the same job on the internet and in many cases jobs are listed for months or years and never filled.
A conservative point of view on universal basic income here:
We should do with less bureaucracy, fewer handouts and empower people to take control of their own lives. Which is what a sensible UBI program does and its far cheaper to run and is far less intrusive than our hodgepodge of welfare programs that promote dependency and fail to reduce poverty.
Putting literally everyone on the dole is the opposite of conservative
Ryan Cooper
Ryan Cooper is a national correspondent at TheWeek.com. His work has appeared in the Washington Monthly, The New Republic, and the Washington Post.
Same here, and please accept my sympathies. Two years ago I voluntarily left the work force to care for ailing parents (who since recovered) and expected to just come back to IT consulting as I had for 20 years.
Lo and behold, the entire consulting business had changed, 1) because H1Bs reached a tipping point where they are now running the consulting agencies and making hiring decisions inside their client corporations, and 2) the online recruiting market has been completely taken over by scammers, phishers, and identity thieves.
It’s hard to find anyone to trust, and then they’re not likely to get the job requisitions they once did, because of hiring quotas, corruption, and outsourcing. The Indian agencies are even getting preferential treatment in the bidding process because they are so-called “minority owned businesses”.
Everything will correct itself when Obama leaves office, if for no other reason than the old systems and documentation will be in serious need of upgrades / updates. Supposedly the corporations are sitting on mountains of cash to do things like that. But until then the job market will continue to be awful.
Ultimately though, I believe the technocratic elites will dispose of much of the population.
I am familiar with several manufacturing and meat-processing concerns in my area. Almost all of the non-management workers are Mexican. I don’t know how many are here legally. Are these the kind of jobs Americans won’t do? These are exactly the kind of jobs that were done by the American men from my neighborhood when I was growing up.
The idea behind is a decent society doesn’t let people fend for themselves. They will always be looked after. But if people want to make more than a guaranteed basic income, they should have that choice. It operates in the opposite manner to welfare programs that forbid a beneficiary from making more than they receive in benefits. Welfare creates a perverse incentive not to work because there is no safety net in place if you do; UBI in contrast, lets you keep your income and earning more is not at problem if you want.
A law to stop progress? Will there be government hitmen to stop the automation?
Will they throw their wooden shoes at the robots?
Want robots at McDonald’s? Hike minimum wage: Zell
CNBC ^ | 3 Sep 2014 | Matthew J. Belvedere
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3201179/posts
socialism is not “progress”
“One thing is for certain there are many, many listings of the same job on the internet and in many cases jobs are listed for months or years and never filled.”
Sometimes unethical agencies do that to sweep up resumes, other times it is for identity theft, where they just copy old job listings and keep re-posting them to attract victims. Then there are keyword searches, where they target-search online for resumes with keywords like “clinical” or “validation” and then flood them with spam, or sell the results to other agencies.
There are a number of other scams, such as point systems within recruiting agencies where bonuses are based on how many applicants you can sign up, how many interviews you can schedule, etc. with no intention of actually hooking an applicant up with a job.
Once long ago, I recall a science-fiction story abut how almost all the citizenry was living in “leisure”, their guaranteed income assured by dividends being distributed from stock holdings in profitable and expanding industries. Most of these people were much like the “trust-fund babies” that today populate a lot of the beaches and spas in sunny climes, but their numbers were vastly multiplied.
The underlying thrust of the story, though, was not conspicuous consumption by all these “leisure” people, but by a designated program in which a good deal of the product of all these prosperous industries was diverted to another whole industry, whose purpose was to DESTROY all the excess production, thus keeping up both the “demand” and eliminating the “inventory”. The system was in danger of imminent collapse when it was revealed this enforced “consumption” was the single factor that was supporting all the economy.
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