Let's make a Deal

Post industrialization is the most critical issue confronting the United States today?

In fact it impacts the entire world as we see the elimination of manual labor in the industrial world.

This is the same phenomena that the world experience as we learned to farm using equipment instead of people.

Now of course we still have some farmers but the output that used to require a 1,000 men now requires a few.

Yes there is some movement to local produce or organic farms but this is more of a pastime than an endeavor to return to an agricultural society.

The excess farmers became factory workers and they were the backbone of the industrial age.

However, similar to agriculture, we now can use dependable robots to do the work of thousands of men. 

Some skilled workers are of course still needed to mind the robots and a few other tasks that haven't been fully automated, but its not hard to imagine a lights out factory.

A lights out factory would be one where no on-site people were required on a routine basis at all, eliminating the need for lighting.

So what happens to all those factory workers?  Service industries are impacted as much as factories are as we no longer have as much need for bank tellers, store clerks, toll collectors, and on and on.

The areas that are growing require specific skills that the displaced workers do not possess, and probably don't want to acquire.  If they had aptitudes for them they would have already acquired them.

I have to be honest, the best opportunity to utilize them is in fixing our infrastructure or to build new infrastructure.  Is this enough to provide jobs for all the displaced workers?  Probably not, but it is certainly a start.

Of course we have to pay for this and we already have enough debt.  Perhaps our deal maker President can get private industry to foot the bill for projects that ultimately benefit them. 

Let's see.