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| Courtesy of the Demotivators |
So, over at the Zerohedge site when I came across this little gem. It was a cross post Submitted by Jim Quinn from The Burning Platform.
A true rant about the lazy bastards who suck off of social security and how the system is already broke. Well, I will certainly agree that the money is gone. CongressCritters stole it a long time ago to pay for their pet projects.
Hmmm. So what is trying to be said here?
This is the quote which really intrigued me.
Just because the scumbags on Wall Street and in the rest of corporate America commit fraud on a massive scale does not mean we should look the other way when lowlifes in our community do the same thing on a smaller scale.Wow.
Everyone is trying to pay no attention whatsoever to the fact that the world has changed a lot lately. A person who goes on SSDI is now a "lowlife". Now, even if the person is capable of working, just what job is available to them? I haven't seen a huge increase in the job creation numbers lately. Truth be told, job creation doesn't even appear to keeping up with population growth.
So what we are developing is a class of non-working poor who still wish to eat and have a warm place to shit. The jobs that they once held are gone to China and the inexorable push of robotics and computerization. In other words, in the words of Bruce:
"Foreman says these jobs are going boys and they ain't coming back
to your hometown"
So, what I am wondering is what do we do? SSDI is being used in a manner it was not being designed for: the long term support of effectively unemployable persons. Some folks squeak about this, but the truth be told, the folks that are applying are usually without any other options.
Being older, under-educated, slow, and unemployable in a compressive collapse is a pretty shitty place to be. The folks that I know who are going this route are any number of combinations of the above.
Over and over again, I keep asking what do we do with folks who don't have the intelligence or tools to compete in a job market that is being shrink to fits the needs of shareholders? Hell, the government even allows companies to deduct the cost of buying the robots being used to kick people out the door. You don't have to look far to find a story about the jobs that used to be.
What do we do?
2 comments:
There is no legal solution.
Greedy shareholders are only half the problem. The other half are legal obstacles that have been put up to restrict access to jobs.
At this point we keep going with the system as it is until it breaks down completely, which should be sometime between 30 days and 30 years.
Robots and international trade require fossil fuel. Eventually human labor will become more valuable again. Then we find ways for people to work to their fullest potential.
I envision a system of room, board, and a small stipend for a moderate amount of work. While SSDI is still an option, I doubt many would participate in such a system, but once government handouts go away, it probably will be popular.
45% of the 1.6 million Afghanistan/Iraq veterans are claiming compensation for injuries, versus 21% of Gulf War vets. They are also claiming far more injuries (10+) than earlier vets - although that may be an effort to make a lot of "minor" injuries add up to enough to count as disability.
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