>I know what you’re thinking – we can’t afford this! But yeah, we can, very easily. We raise the arbitrary lid on the Social Security contribution, which now st

>I know what you’re thinking – we can’t afford this! But yeah, we can, very easily. We raise the arbitrary lid on the Social Security contribution, which now stands at $127,200, and we raise taxes on corporate income, reversing the Reagan Revolution. In other words, we massively increase the scope of human-rights-violating income taxation, while chasing capital out of the country. The problem here is that the author is not making the link between this: >Those jobs that disappeared in the Great Recession just aren’t coming back, regardless of what the unemployment rate tells you – the net gain in jobs since 2000 still stands at zero And this: >The fastest growing component of household income since 1959 has been ‘transfer payments’ from government. By the turn of the 21st century, 20 per cent of all household income came from this source – from what is otherwise known as welfare or ‘entitlements’. The increase in social spending is the most likely cause of the decline in the labor participation rate and the less-than-stellar wage/productivity growth. >But, wait, isn’t our present dilemma just a passing phase of the business cycle? What about the job market of the future? Haven’t the doomsayers, those damn Malthusians, always been proved wrong by rising productivity, new fields of enterprise, new economic opportunities? Well, yeah – until now, these times. The measurable trends of the past half-century, and the plausible projections for the next half-century, are just too empirically grounded to dismiss as dismal science or ideological hokum. They look like the data on climate change – you can deny them if you like, but you’ll sound like a moron when you do. The author is lying. The empirical data does not confirm his technological unemployment hypothesis. The demand for labor globally has grown over the last half century, and it has accelerated over the last couple of decades. Wages have grown faster over the last 20 years than in any period of history: http://www.csmonitor.com/World/2016/0207/Progress-in-the-global-war-on-poverty http://www.csmonitor.com/World/2016/0207/Progress-in-the-glo... Another leftist demagogue looking for government money. If you want to understand how automation affects the demand for labor, I strongly recommend this article over the submitted post: http://www.vox.com/new-money/2016/10/24/13327014/productivity-paradox-innovation-growth http://www.vox.com/new-money/2016/10/24/13327014/productivit...