The employment problem of a large percent of the population in poverty level jobs that pay less than a middle class living cannot be solved by reduced government regulations and reduced taxes on business that supply sliders like Mitt Romney state will cause economic growth and increases in middle class jobs.
The problem of a lack of job growth is being caused in part by automation that is causing dynamic shifts in the job market as to what kinds of jobs are available to people that do not have the aptitude for jobs that require a college education.
People that have a college degree cannot find employment in their fields, they are taking up jobs that do not require a college degree and this is reducing upward mobility.
Other factors are globalization and the past 30 years of off-shoring of manufacturing that has reduced the number of jobs available that can be performed by people with a high school level of education that do not have the aptitude for a job that require a college education.
People that are now seeking employment in jobs that only require a two year associate degree i.e nursing cannot find jobs and nurses are now being lay-offed.
The level of available middle class jobs that pay a living wage have been in decline since the recession of 2008.
The job market growth has mostly been on low paid, low or no benefit type job areas.
Companies are finding that they do not need as many workers as they did prior to the automation and computerization of many tasks and that is reducing the numbers of workers required.
Thus they are not hiring at the levels they did post prior recessions and reduced govenrment regulations and taxes on business is not going to lead to a sharp increase in the number of jobs that pay a living wage.
Case in point:
http://www.technologyreview.com/vie...of-us-jobs-are-vulnerable-to-computerization/
Aviva Hope Rutkin
September 12, 2013
Report Suggests Nearly Half of U.S. Jobs Are Vulnerable to Computerization
Oxford researchers say that 45 percent of America's occupations will be automated within the next 20 years.
Rapid advances in technology have long represented
a serious potential threat to many jobs ordinarily performed by people.
A recent report (which is not online, but summarized
here) from the Oxford Martin School?s
Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology attempts to quantify the extent of that threat. It concludes that 45 percent of American jobs are at high risk of being taken by computers within the next two decades.
The authors believe this takeover will happen in two stages. First, computers will start replacing people in especially vulnerable fields like transportation/logistics, production labor, and administrative support. Jobs in services, sales, and construction may also be lost in this first stage. Then, the rate of replacement will slow down due to bottlenecks in harder-to-automate fields such engineering. This technological plateau will be followed by a second wave of computerization, dependent upon the development of good artificial intelligence. This could next put jobs in management, science and engineering, and the arts at risk.
The authors note that the rate of computerization depends on several other factors, including regulation of new technology and access to cheap labor.
These results were calculated with a common statistical modeling method. More than 700 jobs on
O*Net, an online career network, were considered, as well as the skills and education required for each. These features were weighted according to how automatable they were, and according to the engineering obstacles currently preventing computerization.
Our findings thus imply that as technology races ahead, low-skill workers will reallocate to tasks that are non-susceptible to computerization i.e., tasks that required creative and social intelligence, the authors write. For workers to win the race, however, they will have to acquire creative and social skills.