On April 29, 2013, Josh Boak writes in The Fiscal Times:
Immigration reform is the top priority for Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and much of Silicon Valley—where start-ups and tech giants alike are hampered by their inability to keep talented foreigners in the United States.
This is a problem of a lack of high-tech education opportunities in the United States or an affordable opportunity to master high-tech engineering, scientific and other disciplines necessary to technological innovation and invention––the driving force of societal development.
America should be focused on providing such opportunities to Americans, not foreigners. If America is to create leading-edge leadership in the exponential shift in the technologies of production, then it will need to bolster the level of quality education and affordable opportunity for Americans to be educated in high-tech fields.
As technological progress continues at a rapid pace, the requirement will be for our nation to produce team of people and machines to create the technologies of the future. This will require high levels of education and a significant, but relatively small, educated workforce.
In the final analysis, education is not the solution, though it is critical for our future societal development. But except for a relative few, the majority of the population, no matter how well educated, will not be able to find a job that pays sufficient wages or salaries to support a family or to prevent a lifestyle which is gradually being crippled by near poverty or poverty earnings.
While America needs and will continue to need educated and skilled workers who can make and fix software and machines, still private sector job creation in numbers that match the pool of people willing and able to work will continue to be eroded by physical productive capital’s ever increasing role. As for jobs, they will be limited to the highly-skilled and technical variety, which is far too limited to solve the reality that by the year 2020, more than 50 percent of the jobs available will be minimum wage jobs!
The pursuit for lower and lower cost production that relies on slave wage labor will eventually run out of places to chase. Eventually, “rich” countries, whose productive capital capability is owned by its citizens, will be forced to “re-shore” manufacturing capacity, and result in every-cheaper robotic manufacturing.
“The era we’re in is one in which the scope of tasks that can be automated is increasing rapidly, and in areas where we used to think those were our best skills, things that require thinking,” says David Autor, a labor economist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Businesses are spending more on technology now because they spent so little during the recession. Yet total capital expenditures are still barely running ahead of replacement costs. “Most of the investment we’re seeing is simply replacing worn-out stuff,” says economist Paul Ashworth of Capital Economics.
Yet, while the problem is one that no one can no longer ignore, the solution also is one starring them in the face but they just can’t see the simplicity of it.
The fundamental challenge to be solved is how do we reinvent and redesign our economic institutions to keep pace with job destroying and devaluing technological innovation and invention so not all of the benefits of owning FUTURE productive capacity accrues to today’s wealthy 1 percent ownership class, and ownership is broadened so that EVERY American earns income through stock ownership dividends so they can afford to purchase the products and services produced by the economy.
Providing a way of legitimately getting productive capital ownership into the hands of the people who now don’t have it is the solution to America’s economic decline in wealth and income inequality, which will result in double-digit economic growth and cause EVERY American’s income to significantly grow, providing the means to support themselves and their families with an affluent lifestyle, and provide the necessary tax base to gradually pay off American debts. The Just Third Way Master Plan for America’s future is published at http://foreconomicjustice.org/?p=5797.
Support the Capital Homestead Act at http://www.cesj.org/homestead/index.htm and http://www.cesj.org/homestead/summary-cha.htm
