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| Despite the latest economic news, millions of Americans still cannot find jobs. |
It's an incredible illusion that anyone on Wall Street cares about your well being. They are just out to make money. And I know we all need to pay the bills and live but those investor guys are just interested in making money. What cooks my goose is the way investors keep talking about improving productivity. If the guy has anything to do with technology, he interprets productivity as "kill more jobs".
That is the real problem with the IT revolution. What our parents feared would happen has happened: automation is putting people out of work. We don't have enough jobs to keep everyone employed full time. And now economists are arguing about why world wide productivity has slowed down when technology companies are more efficient than ever.
You cannot make a task more efficient without reducing the amount of labor that is required. Sooner or later as you make a company more efficient it stops hiring new people and then it starts laying off people. Those people still need jobs but no one is creating jobs fast enough to replace them.
And the new jobs pay a lot less than they did 10 years ago. This is what making the world more efficient has led to. We are losing jobs because it takes fewer people to do the work than it used to.
You have guys like Elon Musk investing hundreds of millions of dollars in useless space exploration but they aren't doing anything to put people to work down here where it really counts. We can leave Mars alone for a few more generations. Let's do something about the economy first.
To be perfectly honest, this is why I like what I am hearing from Bernie Sanders. He has a real shot at becoming the Democratic nominee for President and we're really thinking about voting for him. He's a much better choice than Hilary Clinton could be any day.
Donald Trump sounds like he is the Republican Party's front-runner. This guy is a racist pig who has all the class of a pirate about to raid a sleeping village. He rants on and on about illegal immigration but what is he going to do about the companies that keep bringing cheap labor from Asia over to take American jobs?
When companies like Microsoft and Google are too cheap to invest any money in retraining their employees for new skills I just want to puke every time I read they are asking Congress for more H1B work visas. What are all the old employees supposed to do once they have been let go? Microsoft just laid off thousands of workers again.
The world is efficient enough. Now it's time to bring back productivity. It's time to create more jobs and to get people working again. We don't want to live on part-time incomes and welfare. We want to be able to take care of ourselves and our families. We need jobs to do that, not pie-in-the-sky space dreams.
