Q, re: "The economies do need the skill sets, it's just that unemployment payments and minimum wages were invented and those are an insult to people - saying "You are no better than a pet dog. You mean so little to us that we will give you free board and lodgings and we will boss you around like a pet dog as long as you wag your tail properly for us and sit when we tell you to sit." It makes the dog trainers feel important. The dog trainers should be fired and join the rest of the unemployed in finding their true value. Both the trainer and dog will find that there are useful things they can do. "
At the risk of flogging this horse to death, the economy does need those skills. The problem is that it needs a far lower percentage of workers with those skills than ever, while the percentage of workers with limited skills is increasing. The result is decreasing wages and benefits, increasing unemployment and a class of long-term unemployed workers who are capable of doing, as you phrase it, "useful things", for which there is, unfortunately, limited demand.
So what are you proposing that we should do to occupy and find means of support for these low skills workers who are willing to work but find themselves faced with falling wages and benefits as well as dismal numbers of job openings and no light at the end of the tunnel? That's a tough question and one that will continue to get tougher as we become more and more proficient at replacing human labor with mechanical production and even workers with higher skill sets find themselves on the cutting block...(lawyers, accountants and doctors are in the crosshairs now.)
But you surely cannot be attempting to blame the genesis of the mechanization and outsourcing storm they're facing on programs designed to assure food and shelter for them when their sources of income dry up.
Or maybe you can. I've heard all kinds of silly conservatives announce that if we cut off unemployment and support programs then the unemployed would go to work. They can never, however, explain whose jobs they'd take and how switching the names of the unemployed would somehow change the math where we have too many workers poorly suited for skilled work chasing far too few jobs for which they could qualify. Ed |
