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Software Is Hiring, But Manufacturing Is Bleeding
Nerval's Lobster writes: Which tech segment added the most jobs in August? According to new data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, tech consulting gained 7,000 positions in August, (Dice link) below July's gains of 11,100, but enough to set it ahead of data processing, hosting, and related services (which added 1,600 jobs) and computer and electronic-product manufacturing (which lost 1,800 jobs). The latest numbers reflect some longtime trends: The rise of cloud services and infrastructure has contributed to slackening demand for PCs and other hardware, eroding manufacturing jobs. At the same time, increased appetite for everything from Web developers to information-systems managers has kept employers adding positions in other technology segments. If that didn't make things difficult enough for manufacturing folks, the rise of automation has cut down on the number of manufacturing jobs available worldwide, contributing to continuing pressure on the segment as a whole, despite all the noise about bringing those jobs back to the U.S.
At least they're being a little more up front about click bait now...
Keep at it dice, I'm sure with this constant shill drivel someone will pick up Slashdot for a bargain.
horses used to supply horsepower. in the near future, man used to supply manpower. http://www.barrons.com/article...
We're producing less? I'm guessing no and that this is the effects of all that automation I keep hearing isn't happening...
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It is our job, to make computers and robotics faster, smarter and more agile.
Technology is doing things that we use to need specialist for.
Now this overall isn't a bad thing, however there is a problem that technology is improving faster than people are getting educated for. So people who had a good paying medium skill job, are finding that they are being replaced by technology. And we are in a case where we will need 1 technician to manage the technology for every 10 workers.
With our current economic system the only real solution, is having more businesses and expand the economy to give 9 more technicians jobs. Now this isn't easy, because the economy can only grow so much, without having too much pure crap being released.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Manufacturing is a dead end. In thirty years, most 'manufacturing' will consist of downloading a design from the Net and loading it into a 3D printer, either in your garage or the local print shop.
Anyone who thinks we're ever going back to the 1950s economy, with vast numbers of well-paid manufacturing jobs for low-skilled workers, is either deluded, or a socialist. Oh, wait...
We could always do what was done leading up to our 50's manufacturing boom.
And that is... participate in a war that bombs every other developed country into oblivion so that we have absolutely no competition for manufactured goods and can charge whatever we want for them...
So you're saying that being a consultant is up. Maybe that has to do with corporations restructuring to not have full-time employees, and outsource as much as possible to avoid benefit payments. Also you're saying manufacturing is down. Have you considered maybe this has do with the US patent/copyright system and that startups have to invest huge sums of money to verify the ting you want to build is vaguely related to something being held in a warchest somewhere or by a troll. Absolutely improvements in automation reduce the time to produce the same product, but somewhere somebody has to generate new product demand that doesn't own their own fabrication plants on the other side of the world.
Except the only 'manufactured goods' they'll want to buy are 3D printers. You'd have to start World War IP, to force draconian copyright laws on them. Oh, wait...
Or deluded and capitalist and claiming it's possible for companies to grow by 10% every year forever ... or that somehow giving tax breaks to the wealthy and corporations makes everyone else's lives better ... or that corporations are entitled to strip out the jobs from the parent society to maximize shareholder value.
Sorry, but in its current incarnation capitalism relies on just as much delusional fantasy and bullshit as communism ever did.
And it might surprise you that many countries have struck a nice balance between having private industry and pretending like you can have a functioning society if nobody pays for it.
But keep making it into your idiotic partisan position, and keep on demonstrating you're an idiot.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
How many of these positions are H1b?
In the fine lines you can read from the latest labor report that most/all of the new jobs in the US have gone to foreigners (mostly low pay). I'm wondering if the tech narrative fits in with that.
What the fuck does that have to do with being a socialist?!?
In thirty years, most 'manufacturing' will consist of downloading a design from the Net and loading it into a 3D printer, either in your garage or the local print shop.
That will be true for end user products but the construction industry will still be around as well as commercial and industrial manufacturing methods will probably still be cheaper. I don't argue that there's a point in time where 3d printing may take over all types of manufacturing but 30 years may still be still a little early.
I say this because 3d printing has existed for a long time and even with today's low cost material and equipment the cost per piece (when volume applies) is still MUCH higher. With electricity cost being what they are, 3d printing may take a little while longer before it can compete against mainstream manufacturing of volume goods.
That is where it's going with 3d printers. How can people pay the bills if all their intellectual work is free of charge.
You see a much different picture overall
https://research.stlouisfed.or...
https://research.stlouisfed.or...
And here's the chart
http://imgur.com/PA4QfSl
What you have is large numbers of guest/H1B workers being hired while the market for American born workers in any sector is dead stagnant since 2007
BTW thanks for the hope and change.
What the fuck does that have to do with being a socialist?!?
How can you enforce socialism in a world where anyone can make anything they want in their garage?
This is why socialists hate progress so much; they know they're rapidly becoming utterly irrelevant, and are desperate to roll the world back to the 50s. 'Rise up and seize the means of production, comrades!' 'Uh, you mean the 3D printer in my garage?'
Never really worked out that way. Ever contract I've had for the past five years I've had to either be trained in the new position or take extra time to learn it myself. Though the company I'm contracting for is not hiring replacements when people retire and loosing their knowledge base, rather than cutting regular employees lose.
Manufacturing is coming back, but the manufacturing that is coming back is automated. The manufacturing jobs are not coming back.
Oh yes that war is coming. There is no good way to predict what the world will look like after the 30 or so years it will take to fight and rebuild after it. The last World War ended the then current "world order". Part one 1914 - 18 finally ended the European monarchies. Part two seems to have shifted the political focus to a three way balancing act US, Europe, USSR. But did finally answer the question of "What is Germany's place on the European stage". That wave is finally attenuating. By the time the debris stops falling from the next World War we may very well be back to manufacturing jobs performed by humans. The "inexorable progress of history" you envision has had a few episodes of some pretty profound back slides. Its possible that the pinnacle of tech in a 100 years is the blacksmith that is able to forge engine block mined from the wreckage of the vanished cities
cool story
where'd you get the parts to build the 3d printer?
did you smelt your own steel and fabricate your own chips too?
I think another huge contributor to a drop in manufacturing is the oil bust earlier this year. Maybe around a hundred thousand have been laid off now because of that and budgets cut across the board. The sheer amount of steel and labor involved in the last several years of shale booms is mind-boggling. Those areas still don't have good pipeline infrastructure, so oil is often trucked away and surplus gas burned off. It's visible from space and shows up better than nearby metropolitan areas. Look at these images of the Bakken and Eagle Ford Shales.
Meanwhile, all of the tech equipment purchasing supporting those activities has come to a grinding halt.
End of story. In the next decade or two, we'll be printing self driving cars, houses, appliances and possibly replacement organs. AI will increasingly replace nurses, security guards, clerks, and others. As time goes by, you're either the person doing the automating, managing the automation or you're unemployed.
It's not a great message for people with no skills, but it's true, nonetheless. There are still service jobs, but there's a limit to these as well.
A guaranteed basic income in exchange for sterilization is an unpopular idea. I know. Got a better one?
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You seem very confused. Having a perfect 3D printer in your garage means that you, the producer, already control the means of production, and therefore, you are already in socialism.
I have no idea what you think you mean by "enforce socialism" that somehow contradicts being able to make anything you want in your garage.
This said in reality, a single 3D printer that fits in your garage can't possibly do everything -- it's not an energy source, it needs raw material, and it's not going to construct eg. a giant fully-crewed cruise ship in one go -- but it could do a lot of things. The things it can't do could be done by capitalism (some company owns a distribution network; company might be publically traded), or socialism (the aforementioned company is owned jointly by the delivery drivers). You can discuss that.
I used to work designing automation equipment. The two biggest factors in deciding to automate are the labor rate and interest rate. If you are going to automate you are looking for a payback between 2-5 years (at least for the industry I was in). Thr Central banks low Intrest policies make this payback much shorter which leads to more automation. If they actually let the market set rates they would be much higher now which would tend to favor hiring more people instead of automation.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
I don't know if you can really say that.
I mean, apparently a majority of those muslims believe that a good jihad will land them in paradise with the 72 virgins.
I mean, hell, they don't have trouble finding folks to strap a bomb on themselves and blowing themselves up in suicide and taking a few infidels with them.
Why do you believe they'd not be willing to do it on a much larger scale, as long as many more infidels of the great satan are taken out with the effort?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Or deluded and capitalist and claiming it's possible for companies to grow by 10% every year forever ...
This has always struck me as obviously delusional, yet every corporation marches to the same beat. When I worked at HP, I remember how disappointed the stock magi were when we only increased revenue 9% instead of 10%. I kept asking myself, "What are these people going to do when we run out of customers?" I know the Earth's population is growing, but not fast enough for corporate goals.
Sure China, India, and other emerging economies will give a good customer base, but those countries are mostly going to sell local products.
"No matter where you go, there you are." -- Buckaroo Banzai
This is hardly new. There has always been a tradeoff between long term capital investment and the option for using higher cost (per unit manufactured) hand labor. The equation is not just the cost per hour of a person vs. the lifetime cost of a machine. There is often different tradeoffs in quality and flexibility. Due to rising asian labor rates, increased shipping rates, very high Chinese energy costs, the capital cost of product sitting idle in transit and the general brain damage of working with an off shore vendor, manufacturing is moving back to the US. Jobs will not be moving back at nearly the same rate because labor rates are much higher in the US and far fewer americans are willing to stand for eight hours a day snapping together two pieces of plastic. You can expect to see a huge growth in manufacturing engineering jobs and yes even robotics engineers. You can also expect to see changes in product design: faster revision cycles because the engineers are located in the same building/timezone as the factory, different design that make use increased automation vs hand assembly, different material/manufacturing choices to take advantage of different energy/supply chain options and cheaper spare parts.
Sterilization seems overboard. Every woman should be entitled to at least 2x children.
I do think you should be able to buy or sell that entitlement for the total cost of supporting 2x child's living expenses for 18 years.
To avoid inflation, those sales would need to go through an intermediary trust which dispenses the money in 24 payments per year for 18-60 years.
Also, nobody should be able to sell their entitlement until they are 18 years old.
So "yes" to basic income, and "yes" to increasing the basic income for the first 2x children. Take away all 3x basic incomes if they have more than two child though.
This policy would cause a "China" style senior citizen crisis if allowed to run it's course for ~50-60 years so you would have to have lotteries for the remaining fraction of a child which would be necessary to sustain population at replacement levels.
It's predicated on impossible assumptions, and there are not enough resources to either make or have people be able to buy these products.
It's completely irrational the way the stock market works, because it's utterly impossible.
All it is in the near term is moving around resources to benefit corporations and maximize "shareholder value", and therefore "executive bonuses".
It's a fucking Ponzi scheme. It's a lie. It's a complete work of fiction.
Capitalism as it stands now simply cannot work and achieve the outcomes it claims.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
The rise of automation is painfully obvious to anyone who cares to look around. At the same time, there are no jobs that the vast majority of those affected are qualified to do. I worry that a lot of people are going to be pushed into retraining as "techies" and further dilute the talent pool. Seriously, I'm no genius and don't claim to be a rockstar ninja whatever, but I've worked with people who just don't belong near anything technical, at all. Do we really need an influx of factory workers and office drones on top of that?
I've mentioned this before, but think of your typical C student that just barely partied their way through a degree program at Big State University. Traditionally, these C students have landed and held jobs such as (1) random cubicle dweller in the bowels of a large corporation shuffling reports around, (2) low to middle management in large corporations, and (3) state and local government, processing various forms of paperwork or electronic paperwork. Although not too exciting, these jobs are stable, pay decently and allow society to function as-is. There was a _massive_ cut in these paper handling jobs in the 90s, and another in the 2000s, and a lot of these people transitioned to "knowledge workers" or similar -- some found their way to IT also. The problem is that, this time, there are fewer open positions due to automation, offshoring or cloudification of traditional IT jobs. As the amount of intelligence and motivation required to do a job increases, you shut a segment of the workforce out of it, and I believe this is happening now faster than before.
This is even worse for factory workers. Just like the paper pushers, they have a completely uncomplicated job. The bigger problem is that they lack the intelligence to move up the "value chain" even more so than their service worker brethren. I don't know how we're going to solve this macro-level hollowing out of the workforce. Basic income and other proposals aren't going to be workable politically until the vast majority of the population is miserable and un/underemployed. Hopefully we figure something out before civil war breaks out.
This is not simply a product of automation. The Government pays companies to ship manual jobs overseas both directly and indirectly. We are producing less _and_ automation is taking away a percentage of the remaining menial jobs.
I really fail to grasp why people "guess" at answers they could easily find if they bothered to try.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Or deluded and capitalist and claiming it's possible for companies to grow by 10% every year forever ...
You're laboring under a number of misconceptions. What those misconceptions are depends strongly by what you meant when you said the above. For example, I don't believe anyone has claimed that it's possible for companies to grow 10% every year forever. Let's assume, however, that you merely meant that proponents of capitalism claim that growth is better with capitalism than it is with socialism, and that the rest was hyperbole. (I compare it to socialism because that appears to be what you were responding to in 0123456's post.) If so, then capitalism's proponents are right to make that claim. Heritage Foundation makes an annual survey of the economic freedom of the various nations. Insofar as you can claim that economic freedom equates to capitalism (not too great a stretch, I hope), then following the link will show their finding that increasing capitalism correlates with increasing GDP per capita, with increasing economic growth, with reduced poverty intensity, with greater health, with greater education, and with a better environment.
As a lesser matter, I should mention that you're equating companies with capitalism, whereas capitalism can exist in the complete absence of companies. Wikipedia has this to say about capitalism: "Capitalism is an economic system in which trade, industry, and the means of production are largely or entirely privately owned and operated for profit. Central characteristics of capitalism include private property, capital accumulation, wage labour and, in some situations, competitive markets. In a capitalist economy, the parties to a transaction typically determine the prices at which they exchange assets, goods, and services." Notice the complete lack of the word "companies" or with its concept. I'm not saying that capitalisms can't have companies. Rather I'm saying that it's an independent concept. In fact, if you consider a continuum from economic freedom to a command economy, then companies are a step in the direction of command economies. Companies are a way to limit the risks taken by one party to a transaction (typically the seller) by increasing the risk to society. This is frequently called "socializing the risks," and for good reason.
or that somehow giving tax breaks to the wealthy and corporations makes everyone else's lives better ...
It depends strongly on the tax break. If you tax profits at the rate of 91%, then you eliminate many more business opportunities than you would if you taxed them at 27%. To give you an example, suppose that a particular opportunity costs $100,000 to risk. Perhaps a new pick-and-place machine for a surface mount printed circuit board line. Suppose further that the opportunity has a 50% chance of profiting $500,000 if it's successful, and a 50% chance of losing the entire $100,000. At 91% tax you have a 50% chance of losing $100,000, and a 50% chance of gaining (1-0.91)$500,000 = $45,000, for an expected loss of $5,000. You shouldn't take the risk. However, at 27% tax you have a 50% chance of losing $100,000, and a 50% chance of gaining (1-0.27)$500,000 = $365,000, for an expected gain of $315,000. Any risk with an expected loss shouldn't be undertaken, which means society doesn't benefit from the undertaking of that risk, offset somewhat by the possibility of the loss of the pick-and-place machine in a losing venture.
On the other hand, any number of other tax breaks, such as giving a guaranteed loan to someone that can't otherwise convince venture capitalists to invest, you would be right about.
Sorry, but in its current incarnation capitalism relies on just as much delusional fantasy and bullshit as communism ever did.
I'm not sure why we've changed the topic from socialism to communism, but...econ
I aim to misbehave.
A distinction that needs to be made: we're bringing manufacturing back to the United States but not necessarily all the manufacturing jobs. Automation and other manufacturing efficiencies developed over the last three decades means we can make more with much few people, and even the quality of those jobs is different from before - in the old days, it would be large numbers of middle class, blue collar jobs. Now, it's a small handful of highly skilled white collar workers and an army of minimum wage individuals who only have their jobs because they're still cheaper than a robot.
Yeah, I have a better idea. Basic income, full stop. For everyone.
We don't need some distopian decrease in population through mandatory sterilization. We have enough to feed, clothe, house, etc. the population, even as it increases. Automation will keep increasing as well.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
...We have enough to feed, clothe, house, etc. the population, even as it increases.
Yes, for a little while, until the cheap (emphasis on cheap) hydrocarbons run out (They will always exist).
Until the mined phosphates run out.
Until enough major aquifers in major agricultural areas run dry.
Until some whackjob with a nuke or two decides that the problem of resource scarcity can be solved by nuking their neighbors.
2100 is going to be the start of an interesting era. I'm grateful that I won't be here for the show. Starvation doesn't suit me.
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The attempts to measure "economic freedom" reward despotic countries that have low transactional friction.
Whether it is Heritage, Mercatus, or another favorite anti-American measurement du jour, they ignore any freedom that does not contribute to a economic transaction.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
The main point still stands - contracting is used as a dodge to benefits or legal requirements.
Any pretense of "flexibility" is almost always in the favor of the agency and client, while the talent is viewed as a problem.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Pardon me for going political, but the GOP is either clueless, or echoing propaganda of the rich in exchange for money or favors.
Their idea of "fixing" the economy is to lower taxes and regulations, which will allegedly create some undefined wad of new employment or inventions that stimulate general hiring.
But there is plenty of investment money floating around; it's not the current bottleneck. The rich are already bidding up fishy dot-coms and real-estate to bubble-sniffing levels because they don't know where else to put all their cash, other than overseas factory mines.
I suppose it's true that less regulations may allow us to compete with 3rd world nations, but we would gain the negative conditions of the 3rd world nations to get that (pollution, slave-like hours/treatment, worker injuries, etc.)
Either we need increased socialism, and/or add tariffs on countries with lopsided trade ratios with us. So called "protectionism" is keeping Japan's employment high. True, goods are more expensive there, but perhaps its time to trade "stuff" for jobs. Masses of unemployed are a recipe for trouble.
GOP is living in the 70's. But I guess living in the past is the very essence of "conservatism". They are true to their mission, one can say, even if it's a misguided mission.
Table-ized A.I.
Correction: should be "overseas factories and mines" not "overseas factory mines".
Table-ized A.I.
US GDP is heavily skewed by high-ticket military equipment
This skew actually makes manufacturing a lot less sustainable in the US.
See, the real reason why China is so dominant at this point is that the supply chains have migrated there. Labor costs, adjusted for productivity, tariffs, shipping, etc. have about reached parity.
So, without a good supply chain, you have a hard time being a manufacturer.
The military pays silly prices for stuff. So that means that a company that sells to the military has a silly price sheet. Which means that they're not an option for a non-military manufacturer to use them as a supplier.
The problem is that too many suppliers are getting a taste of that sweet, sweet military money, and there are no available options for "normal" manufacturers. And then, lights out for an entire line of products that could be manufactured here, but won't be.
If the military budget ever gets slashed, expect a manufacturing comeback.
How do I know this? I'm a manufacturer here in the US, and this happens to us constantly.
I see a lot of smug comments about either Democrats (D) or Republicans (R) when the reality is that both parties have done their best, at the behest of their well heeled sponsors, to have the rich get richer while the 99% gets the shaft. "Free trade" deals have been done under both D and R and in both cases created a race to the bottom that decimated the middle class. Wages have been stagnant since the early 70s, and in the past 40+ years there have been multiple D and R administrations. This is not a partisan issue, both D and R sold us out.
There's a conservative, a working man and a Union man at a table with 10 cookies. The conservative snatches up 9 cookies and gobbles them up. Then he turns to the working man and says "Hey, watch out, that guys gonna eat your cookie".
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It's around 7%. Capitalists don't claim it's "forever" (what is?), but there is certainly no end in sight.
Correct.
Correct, they are entitled to do that.
In your dreams.
Take your own advice.
Your assumptions are wrong. In fact, a lot of growth is the result of gains in efficiency. For example, higher energy efficiency, faster computers, better programming languages, more powerful motors, etc. all correspond to economic growth. A lot of other value that is created is better entertainment, scientific knowledge, medical insights, that is, valuable information.
You're making a false zero-sum assumption. In fact, some of the most successful sectors, like services, entertainment, and IT, don't rely on "moving resources around"; their growth is almost entirely due to the creation of knowledge.
You're like someone sitting in an airplane arguing that man will never fly. It's "fucking idiotic".
That conclusion is based on a simplistic analysis of tax records, not taking account demographic changes and not taking into account the vastly increased amounts of government services and benefits people increase. Furthermore, increases in government benefits and services primarily hurt the middle class, because that's who necessarily has to pay for it.
So, some people get rich through political corruption and that hurts the country. A lot of that political corruption is, in fact, directly related to increases in government services, because the easiest way to get money from the government is to get the government spend it on your products, whether it is military aircraft or drugs, and that spending is necessarily paid for through taxes. Other political corruption is based on giving tax breaks or financial support to the middle class for things specific industries lobby to sell, whether it's houses, solar cells, or education.
"The rich" vs "the 99%" is a false dichotomy. There is clearly a lot of crony capitalism in this country, but there are also clearly many more people who got rich through hard work and without crony capitalism. If you take money away from "the rich" in general because some people who have money happen to be corrupt, you are throwing out the baby with the bathwater and you're not fixing the problem.
We'll be using bioenginered bacteria to make cheap hydrocarbons long before 2100, and cheaper than drilling them.
Reclaiming phosphates seems the hardest problem. And I don't know that much about it, but assume it's solvable.
The aquifers, like all water issues will get solved by desalination. The major agricultural areas will move to where water can be used from the sea.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
That conclusion is based on a simplistic analysis of tax records, not taking account demographic changes and not taking into account the vastly increased amounts of government services and benefits people increase.
I agree that there are lots of ways to arrange the data, however all of them show that wages for most people are stagnant or in some cases falling. If you look at the average wage vs productivity, a slightly different argument but still relevant, you find that wages have not risen proportionally with productivity though they largely did until the 70s. The poor have done much better comparatively speaking due to the government programs you mentioned. Taxing at rates comparable to earlier years is not throwing out the baby with the bath water. Having a graduated capital gains tax would be awesome since that's where all the gains in income have been. Using the NSA's mass surveillance to track down off shore money would be a great idea. There are a lot of things that can and should be done but "free trade", corruption, barely taxing wealth especially capital gains, and off shore money should all be addressed. So far only Bernie and Trump are touching any of these topics so I'm not optimistic.
Google it. We have 3D printed cars, 3D printed buildings, and of course tons of tiny stuff. Smaller stuff you'll be able to print yourself, more exotic or larger stuff you'll have to go to the local 3D print shop.
There are reasons why you might not want to use a 3D printer. First, they can be expensive, especially if you want precision or large size or the right materials or something like that. Second, they can't do everything. Third, and this applies to mass production, making something with a 3D printer is usually a lot more expensive than making it with a custom-designed process.
Of course, this custom-designed process is going to involve skilled engineers making it, and will be largely automated, so there still will be an acute shortage of well-paying low-skill jobs.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
If anyone can make anything they want in their garage, then the means of production are in the hands of the workers, and we have complete socialism which doesn't need "enforcement" (whatever that is), and socialists are happy. Socialists worry about progress because it has a strong tendency to concentrate power and wealth, not because it might promote socialism.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
"Wages" are the wrong measure; you need to look at the combination of wages, non-wage compensation, working hours, defined benefits, government programs, and insurance. Second, you need to look at the workforce and demographics: as more women enter the workforce, as more family activities get turned into jobs, and as fewer people are married, of course, wages drop.
People like "Bernie" are the primary cause of both the nominal stagnation of wages (by forcing people to pay for crap they don't want or need), and for the generally slow growth of the economy. If you want to wreck our economy and economic future completely, vote for Bernie.
Of course it is: higher tax rates will cause companies, and increasingly workers, to (legally) evade taxes, or even flee the country to live where tax burdens are lower.
But even if we could tax at higher rates, what for? So that Bernie or Hillary or whoever can engage in even more crony capitalism?
But even if we could tax at higher rates, what for? So that Bernie or Hillary or whoever can engage in even more crony capitalism?
You touch on what I consider to be one of the largest wrongs of the current way of doing things. If the rich are taxed more what is done with the tax proceeds? That's a fair question that I don't think gets enough attention. The current thinking is to give ever more to the poor such that for many people being a non-working person is advantageous over being a entry level or minimum wage worker. That's just morally wrong. Non-working people should *never* have it better than working people. My personal suggestion is to do something that would affect all productive people not just the poor and especially not the non-working. So I'd suggest taking the taxes and giving them out as a quarterly bonus to anyone who had worked that quarter with no means testing. Legal workers get a bonus, lazy people and those here illegally or working under the table don't. I don't care why you aren't working (ie don't care if you're retired, on medical leave, laid off, fired, can't find a job - really don't care). This could also be done with tariffs. I'm not naive enough to think that this situation would be allowed to last in a pure form, but one can dream.
"Has worked" by what criteria? Did they do anything useful? Does some artist who produces shitty paintings nobody wants get money?
What about a system in which, if you do something useful for your fellow human beings, they give you tokens rewarding you, and how many tokens you have indicates how valuable you are to society?
Well, there is such a system: the free market, and the tokens are called "dollars". The only problem is that we don't actually implement this system very well, since the government keeps deciding that normal people don't know what they really want and that these tokens need to be redistributed according to other schemes.
By has worked I meant a job, as in the kind that pays wages and taxes. I hear your concern that the free market does much of this, however inequality is a greater concern than keeping a "pure" free market. Moreover the market is anything but free or else we'd be able to buy prescription drugs from Canada at 1/3 the cost. What's your plan for improving things?
Why is "inequality" a concern? We should make sure nobody starves, but beyond that, I don't see inequality as a problem.
While some inequality may be due to lack of fairness, if you give government the power to redress unfair situations, it will invariably abuse that power, and the cure is worse than the disease.
Which is why I said: "The only problem is that we don't actually implement this system [the free market] very well,"
Remove restrictions on the market; reduce regulations; privatize; stop worrying about inequality.
Now, such a transition is painful. Privatization involves enormous amounts of corruption (after all, who are you going to give all those publicly owned resources to) until finally market forces start operating again. And workers not used to operating in a free market and viewing themselves as a valuable resource rather than a wage slave are going to screw up for a while. It's still the right thing to do.