I have people on Facebook that countdown how many days until Friday.... Come Friday at 5pm, they are done for the week.

I hate weekends. Weekends mean I have to try to work based around my family's needs and desires.

so lets say someone earns $15/hr now, works 40 hours, earns $600/week...

under your plan, they will work lets say 20 hours? how much will they earn?

People will soon be counting down to Thursday... or alternating days, etc... :2 cents:

You need to elect 12clicks as your president. :winkwink:

That is the issue that has to be solved, and it won't be a simple one line answer. People who work 9-5 and have no interest in 'climbing up' aren't trying to get a new lambo... but they do need to be able to eat, have access to transportation, see doctors, etc... Earning less dollars isn't that much of a problem, if basic healthcare is provided by the government rather than as out of pocket expenses. We *could* provide canned vegetables for free to people at a very low cost as another example and the impact of people actually eating them would reduce the cost of healthcare overall.

What we are headed for is a system that subsidizes the bottom of the society by providing basic healthcare, housing, food, etc... for free or so cheaply it may as well be free, and requires them to save their income if they want to buy iphones, flat screen televisions, new cars and the like. Going to see a doctor of your choice and getting a private hospital room or things of that sort will cost cash (or be possible with private supplemental insurance paid for by consumers), but going to a free clinic for basic wellness and emergency care will be free for the masses of people who choose not to pay for private care and needs to be a truly functional system which it presently is not.

A system like what I have seen proposed allows society to choose what basic things should be provided to everyone, no matter how lazy incompetent or dim witted you happen to be. Nobody is 'living large' on a free can of string beans. Nobody is ballin' because they got to have their pregnant wife seen by doctors during prenatal visits. You won't see subsidized housing units on MTV Cribs any time soon. If people want more than that they can scratch and work for it. Those that work 4 days a week will have plenty of time off to enjoy public parks, days at the beach, long afternoons with friends in clean safe neighborhoods etc... those who work 8 days a week can live in nicer houses and drive lambos. That is the way it should (and will) be eventually.

What we can't have is 1/2 the population out of work, hopeless, poorly fed, without preventative health care, uneducated and with zero chance of improving their lot due to lack of aptitude and opportunity while .01% of our population bleeds billions out of the economy while creating no jobs and voids their citizenship to take the money overseas by cashing out at the end like our country is a 2bit casino in the back of a whorehouse.

Rather than giving 16B in subsidies to Exxon, we might want to think about providing free canned vegetables to every American who wants them. Instead of burning crops to stabilize price, we might make them available at food pantries across the country. Instead of denigrating poor people for being dim... we ought to understand they are often poor BECAUSE they are dim, and we can help them enough for them to reach their potential because that is what society is all about. Helping each American reach their potential pushes our nation forward, whether they are capable of buying a fleet of private jets or working 20 tedious hours a week in a call center or staying home to raise their children. Instead of helping people reach their potential, we stamp them as 'the problem' and act like we are better than them... even as more and more of our population becomes part of that ever-growing category.

You have provided nothing to this discussion. Congrats?

Incidentally, you might call it 'trickle up economics.' A hard floor that nobody can fall below and everyone can use if they choose... It will only be a transitional phase for decades. Centuries from now, do you really think more than 10% of us will be needed to keep everything running? I'd be shocked if more than 1% of us have a job by then. Considering the fact that people on this board are webmasters automating massive amounts of work every day, I find it ironic that most have not considered the fact that we will eventually produce more than we need with very few of us working.

In some way they have to. Except it needs to be reworded.

Relentless has some great points, except as an employer I can't run my business on people working 4 days a week. And very few can. MacDonalds can and for those type of jobs it's great. Minte can't and fr him its disaster.

The West has to accept that countries who were once very poor are now rich. There has been little new wealth created, it's meant that wealth that was the exclusive preserve of the West now isn't. It's in the Middle East, Asia. Far East and S. America. It's left the US and Europe. So expecting to enjoy the same standard of living as we had before is delusional.

So we have to forget the dream of the good old days returning and get on with the future without building horrendous debts.

The West still produces a nice chunk of cash that needs to be shared better. Not by letting people sit at home, by creating jobs for them that make the society they live in a better place.

And if you don't. 12 million is 12 million less potential customers. The one thing the Capitalist and Consumer system needs is consumers. Cut them out of being consumers and you have less buyers.

Will cutting taxes, cut jobs? YES.
Will more unemployed lead to more spending? NO.

All it will do is mean, a few can buy a better model car, better pair of jeans, better mobile phone. Romney is lying to you when he says it will create more spending. Well it will for him and the 1%. For the rest it won't.

Yes you're going to have to pay more tax, you're going to have to invest in your retirement and yes you're going to need customers to buy memberships. And if anyone thinks they can do that by putting people out of work or getting them behind the counter in Wal Mart, so they can shop at Neiman Marcus. They shouldn't be posting in this thread.

"a lot of money" is very subjective, $50k/year is a lot to someone who makes $5k/year, someone making $50k/year thinks people that make $500k/year is a lot, etc... it's always a lot when it's a lot more than you...

bottom line is, many people do not work, they do not contribute anything to society, and yet they have to be supported by those that do work... obviously it's a problem, but it's not a problem of who do we tax more to support them... but a problem of how can we make them contribute their fair share so they can support themselves...

Paul/Relentless what percentage of your income did you donate to help the poor when you were working? (I mean, in addition to any taxes you were required by law to pay)

Paul you are so out of touch with the U.S.

Did you know that since the "War On Poverty" started in 1965 by President Johnson, we have spent over 13 TRILLION dollars to eradicate poverty in the U.S.?

Read this:
"All together, the federal government spent more than $591 billion in 2009 on means-tested or anti-poverty programs, and will undoubtedly spend even more this year. That amounts to $14,849 for every poor man, woman and child in America. Given that the poverty line is just $10,830, we could have mailed every poor person in America a check big enough to lift them out of poverty ? and still saved money. "

I worked all weekend. I can sleep well tonight knowing that my hard-earned money will help those out there who partied weekend.

It is a glorious feeling. Hoorah!

I don't necessarily agree with your claim, over the past decade, unemployment was always <10%... I don't see any reason why next decade would be much different...

You pointed out earlier in the thread that some jobs are now gone...

sure, we no longer have bank tellers, but now we have webmasters, we no longer have "Street Light / Exterior Electrician", but now we have satelite dish installers... we have fewer check out clerks, but we have more computer repairmen... etc

Those that are willing to retrain, have a job now and will have a job in the future... :2 cents:

Sad that all the "solutions" for the future don't include the obvious ..... "Stop shitting out kids you can't afford or don't intend to stick around and take care of"

Actually it was down around 5% and less the whole time. Which is the definition of full employment.
Relentless is way off base.

That stuff was predicted when I was in highschool in the 1970's and never happened.
Matter of fact we were supposed to be out of oil by the 1980's, driving around in flying cars, robots would replace everyone at work, the Earth was on it's way to an Ice Age because of fossil fuels, etc.

Reality is...once the housing market stabilizes, the economy will turn back around and we will be back at around 5% unemployment again.

It's only been since the end of 2008/start of 2009 that all this came down and unemployment shot up. And none of that was caused by automation or anything else except the housing market fucking the economy.

As usual, you are incorrect. Union tradesman have had furlough programs and split shifts in place for decades. They can work very well if implemented correctly. Production actually increases when people with mundane jobs they dislike get time off. It won't work for most managerial roles where continuity is essential, like the foreman on a major job site with 50 men working under his supervision... but using 75 men instead of 50 and splitting the work among them turns out to be more efficient in most cases. It also keeps many more people employed.

The same holds true for many 9-5 jobs.

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. :2 cents:

"<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. :2 cents:

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. :2 cents:

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.

The problem the US faces, is the same as France, UK, Italy, Greece, Portugal, Eire and probably a few more face.

It's simple. Lower manufacturing and export have led to fewer jobs in those sectors. Some were soaked up in the Services Industries, Financial Industries and Government spending. To keep money circulating in as many hands as possible.

PLUS huge borrowing.

The Bank collapse showed the cracks, the deregulation of the banks made the cracks wider. Then many of the jobs created were lost.

Now we have people blaming the victims of faulty system. Yes there are some crack sellers who will always be a problem. Does that include the people put out of a job over the last 4 years?

http://data.bls.gov/generated_files/...d_M08_data.gif

Spain: 25.1% Cutting spending.
Portugal: 15.9% Cutting spending.
Ireland: 15% Cutting spending.
Italy: 10.7% Cutting spending.
France: 10.6% Cutting spending.
UK 8.1% Cutting spending.
Germany: 5.5%
Eurozone: 11.4% Cutting spending.
US: 8.1%
Japan: 4.1%

http://www.mybudget360.com/wp-conten...yment-rate.png

Now some Americans to get your vote are telling you they will cut the spending, lower taxes and this will boost spending and lead to recovery.

If anyone thinks switching money from Jim to John, boosts spending. They need to tell us how.

This problem is so much harder to solve than that. THE WEST, did you get that Robbie?, either accepts a lower standard of living or it gets some of the money flowing into the emerging economies back. Cutting spending will send more of that money to the emerging economies.

Minte said his largest contract was from Vietnam, does anyone wonder how Vietnam is now able to spend that kind of money and why it's not being spent by a US company or the Government?

Now the victims are lazy, unsuccessful and because they lost their jobs their support is now a reward.

Great pig in a trough mentality.

So we cut the money to the unemployed, they go out and try to find a job that doesn't exist. Then what, maybe they come knocking on your door.

Then what about all the people organising the payouts, shall we sack them as well to keep your taxes low?

What about all the shops where the unemployed shop, besides the meth and crack shops, do we shut them and sack the workers as well?

Then what about the places, the now unemployed office and shop workers, spend their money, do we close them as well? Some of them might be your customers, did you figure that in as well? Because a guy spending $30-$50 a month isn't much better off than the people you're turning into lazy, unsuccessful people who expect to be rewarded for the job they lost.

Money never stops circulating, until it leaves the country.

Tell us guys what will you spend your $500 a year windfall on? Beside a big ass gun to keep the lazy, unsuccessful people from your door. Maybe a Nokia phone.

I hope you also feel good that that hard earned tax money you pay out, also gets given out to large corporations in tune of govt provided subsidies. I hope you feel just as happy that you are helping provide a fortune 500 CEO a nice weekend off and likely an extra bonus at the end of the year in profit sharing.


Really, if you are going to bitch about stupid stuff, at least spread the bitching around equally to all those that deserve it, instead of just a narrow focused FOX news approved agenda. :1orglaugh

Oddly enough, I don't watch Fox News.

Which one of us is the propaganda eating sheep?

I saw something the other day that suggested that training kids to care about employment and success was all wrong. Seems they would fit in well here.

You're right. Many here think the unemployed should be ignored and not get benefits. So they can have a bit more to spend.

:pimp :pimp

:thumbsup :thumbsup

That was easy. :1orglaugh

http://sphotos-b.xx.fbcdn.net/hphoto...02987855_n.jpg

Here is the problem

Fuller was awarded 28 United States patents and many honorary doctorates. In 1960, he was awarded the Frank P. Brown Medal from The Franklin Institute. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1968. In 1970 he received the Gold Medal award from the American Institute of Architects. He also received numerous other awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom presented to him on February 23, 1983 by President Ronald Reagan. He invented the Geodesic dome and the Otisco Project among other things - and studied the underpinnings of economics, political philosophy and human survival more than most people.

Fuller was concerned about sustainability and about human survival under the existing socio-economic system, yet remained optimistic about humanity's future. Defining wealth in terms of knowledge, as the "technological ability to protect, nurture, support, and accommodate all growth needs of life," his analysis caused him to conclude during the 1970s, humanity had attained an unprecedented state. He was convinced that the accumulation of relevant knowledge, combined with the quantities of major recyclable resources that had already been extracted from the earth, had attained a critical level, such that competition for necessities was not necessary anymore.

In fact he was right. We are capable of producing more food than we can eat today, even in the face of the greatest drought since the dust bowl, with a tiny fraction of our population employed in the food production industry. In any other era you would see mass starvation during a drought of this magnitude... and yet, these days not a single item is unavailable on supermarket store shelves and at most it has resulted in a small price increase. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/0...n_1871993.html and yet Most people don't even know a drought is underway.

So yeah, that underachiever idiot Fuller clearly was the problem. Planned obsolescence in product lines for the sole purpose of creating demand, shorter than necessary lifespans on appliances, and a continued march toward automation of most tasks is clearly all his misunderstandings. It must be that he didn't get it lol .. /facepalm

Fuller, Steve Jobs, Ray Kurzweil... and other elite achievers, some of the most inventive people in the last century, have echoed the same sentiments. We are moving beyond the period of human history where each person has to earn more than they consume and our society is becoming so technologically complex that many people will be unable to do more than the very minimum in our economy moving forward. A period that could be dominated by thought, peace and prosperity... if we move past the mystical certitude of religion, militant ignorance of political parties and angry emotional attachment some people seem to feel for the status quo.

We need more universities, hospitals, mentors and a renewed interest in Science for its own sake. Less prisons, aircraft carriers, high frequency trading hedge funds and violent religious zealots. It's a pretty simple choice really. :2 cents: