Report Card for Donald Trump

[David Horn]

(12-26-2016, 05:36 PM)SomeGuy Wrote: I am all for infrastructure investment.  I said that quite clearly on this thread.  There is indeed ample room for public works, and that investment on this scale would do much to address the competitiveness of the US economy and the (under)employment problem in this country.  

All of that is fine.  What I was objecting to was an open-ended policy of the government providing jobs to people as an end in itself.  There is just too much opportunity for mismanagement, for waste, for an expanding and bloated bureaucracy.  I feel that targeted spending on public works, hiring people to build the necessary infrastructure as efficiently as possible, in conjunction with a broader policy of wage subsidies to alleviate conditions on the lower end of the socioeconomic scale, would be more effective.

Think ahead.  At most, we are 30 years away from a world where almost all human-supplied work will be unnecessary.  Automaton and AI will cross the line where the automatons are able to create more automatons with limited human interaction.  At that point, the cost of human effort will be almost infinitely higher than that provided by machines.  We need an economic model that still operates in that environment, or chaos will ensue. 

Killing off the non-owners is a non-starter for obvious reasons.