Does Welfare Have to be the New Normal?

[eridani]

http://www.nationofchange.org/does-welfare-have-be-new-normal-1386081767

At the end of 2011, the last year for which data are available, some 108.6 million people received one or more means-tested government benefit programs––bureaucratese for welfare.

Meanwhile, the Census data showed that there were just 101.7 million people with full-time jobs, including both the private and government sectors.

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The percentage of Americans with jobs is at a 20-year low due to tectonic shifts in the technologies of production and job destruction resulting from off shoring production to global economies who pay workers far less. In every industry, we are witnessing fewer interactions with other human beings. While conventional economists, academia, and political leadership has called upon education as the solution, the changes are coming so quickly it will be difficult for workers to retrain themselves and effectively compete for far fewer jobs over time. They are disadvantaged to compete with super-computers, which can program themselves to improve their performance. Even if the entire American population was college educated, there still would not be the need in the private sector to create jobs in numbers that match the pool of people willing and able to work due to human work constantly being eroded by physical productive capital’s ever increasing role. Technology increasingly is demonstrating skills on a par with and even surprising human skills.

While entrepreneurs will continue to create new business opportunities, the reality is that they will not be hiring large numbers of people. Public companies such as Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google, for example, represent in total about $1 trillion in market capitalization value. Yet together they employ fewer than 150,000 people––less than ALL the new entrants into the American workforce monthly.

[TheKentuckian]

1. Hell, they are 24/7 AT WORK to whittle down and eliminate the semblance of a net we have.

Have you noticed how quickly the worst case scenario becomes not too shabby or even the new best case scenario?