The bogeyman of small families and long life are irrelevant when the companies wouldn't hire them anyway due to robotics and automation. You posited a 50% unemployment while the list ten years ago posited a 40%. Either way it wouldn't matter whether the elderly lived a few more years or the families had fewer children if the children that were born weren't hired.
The game you are accepting on this is called a "shell game" for who gets the blame. The result is that the people walking away with the money don't get taxed and aren't blamed either for not hiring under the economist rubric of "productivity" which is great. However under productivity I am working twice as long as my teacher for half the funds. But I'm still required to have the same knowledge as he to keep up the quality of the opera house. Screw that! REH From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Keith Hudson Sent: Monday, September 26, 2011 4:13 AM To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION Subject: Re: [Futurework] How Long (Before this happens here? At 21:49 25/09/2011, Mike Gurstein wrote: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/25/world/europe/as-welfare-state-collapses-gr eeks-suffer-and-fear-future.html Not very long, to answer the question in the Subject line. As well the Greeks might be fearing already. As well we might, too. In England we have an incredibly inefficient and wasteful welfare state and major reforms have been planned for years. But now our Treasury officials (the real power-holders in any and every nation-state) have just told our Chancellor that we can't even afford the cost of reforms! Headlines in today's Daily Telegraph are: "Osborne is warned of welfare reform disaster" No advanced nation-state can afford an "adequate" welfare state for much longer because it was devised (unknowingly) as a Ponzi scheme. Unlike a private pension scheme in which money is saved and invested in a fund which then pays profits as dividends, nation-state welfare schemes depend on current worker contributions. In the state system, as the burden of the old, the ill, the delinquent and the unemployed grows, then taxation from workers is supposed to grow even faster to pay for it. The originators of the modern welfare state (Count von Bismark in 19th century Germany and Lord Beveridge in 20th century England) shouldn't really be blamed. In the heyday of economic growth they both thought that there would always be plenty of current workers available to pay for it. They were also unable to foresee just how long people would live these days or how small families would become. Those who ought to be blamed, however, are the civil servants (and their politician puppets) of the last few decades in the advanced countries who've been in denial and have made no effort to reform it so far. They must have been aware of the problem because they've been surreptitiously encouraging mass immigration by poor people from the Third World who can live (to them, in relative luxury) off welfare state handouts while they look for work*. The free movement of labour according to skills is one thing but this devious practice for political power purposes has been quite another. *And have competed for jobs more successfully against the dregs of our own secondary school system -- another product of the advanced nation-state. In England, among 14 year-old boys, approaching half are now completely alienated from education and would like to leave school if they were allowed to. I dare say it's not a lot different in Western Europe and America. We'll always have welfare (if we remain remotely human) but it won't be of the sort that presently operates. Besides the collapse of state welfare systems we'll likely have the collapse of most large private pension schemes. Most of them had black holes even before the 2008/9 collapse. Many of them are already adjusting their pensions downwards. If (or, rather, when) the Eurozone economy collapses to a new lower level, likely taking America and China with it, then state welfare will likely regress to something like a benefit-queue system with basic hand-outs irrespective of real need or former expectations. Keith Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/2012/08/
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