Either the
USA has moved to a different planet overnight or the laws of mathematics have
been repealed for the Presdent’s second term.
The acceptance speech this time included the great insight that:
“ if
you’re willing to work hard, it doesn’t matter who you are or where you come
from or what you look like or where you love. It doesn’t matter whether you’re
black or white or Hispanic or Asian or Native American or young or old or rich
or poor, able, disabled, gay or straight, you can make it here in America if
you’re willing to try.”
So either
America has now discovered unlimited wealth which was in very limited evidence
during the first term or other physical limits have been now been removed for
the second term. Obviously if you don’t
feel you’re making it in America then you are simply not working hard enough or
unwilling to try! All you really need to
do is work a bit harder than the next guy and you should be alright. Obviously there is quite a significant
percentage, certainly a good deal higher than the official 8% or so that aren’t
working at all. However that’s pretty
much your fault too and you should just get a job and work hard – there is an
awful lot of govt debt and we need to
tax you to have any chance of credibly growing this over the next four years. The fact the president’s healthcare reforms
are likely to have the unintended consequence of driving many from full-time to
part time work isn’t really relevant here.
If we
define ‘making it’ fairly generously as an income of $50,000 and assume you are
flipping burgers in MacDonalds at around $8 an hour then based on working 250
days per year you would only need to work 25hrs a day in order to make it. Clearly this will present no problem to you
in the fantasyland the president now envisions.
It’s not clear how long the day is on this new planet but hopefully
there will also be some time for spending money as consumption is also
essential to collecting taxes and the Government finds it easier to grow if
taxes are rising too.
The fact
that technology and progress is removing the requirement for many jobs can
rightly be viewed as potentially beneficial.
However it really does mean there is massively less work that needs to
be done than there was previously. If
everybody in work is trying to work harder and longer than everyone else then
we inevitably end up with the sort of ridiculous distribution of wealth and
leisure time that we have at the moment.
We need to face up to this problem, make all of our jobs much easier to
do, and then work out how we share work, wealth and leisure between us in a
sensible and adult manner. The real
opportunity for progress is immense – however none of our politicians seem to
have any sort of grasp on how to deliver this.
I think a global strategy and effective use of existing technology as
detailed at http://www.scribd.com/doc/98216626/New-Global-Strategy can provide the answer.
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