Something interesting a friend brings up, with increased automation someday there will simply be not enough jobs to go around no matter how well the economy is supposedly doing.
He calls it a basic income, at first sounded like nothing more than expanding welfare, however upon further research it replaces much of the current welfare, foodstamp, unemployment, and section 8 programs.
And the day is coming, a company in Europe had a convoy of trucks self drive from a port to a distribution center, each one still had a driver in case something went wrong, but they did self drive a considerable distance with zero issues. Won't be long before a bunch of farm labor will be obsolete, take your RTK auto steer tractor to the field, press the start button on your smart phone and come back to get it when it notifies you its done.
Anyways, back to basic income, everybody gets $12,000 (a number he just pulled out of thin air, $1000 a month for easy figuring) to do with what they please, wanna blow your monthly allotment on hookers, blow and tattoos fine, you won't eat or have a roof over your head till next month as food stamps and section 8 vouchers won't be available anymore.
Basic income replaces food stamps, WIC, section 8 vouchers, un employment, cash assistance and so on, eventually even social security. Part of it's paid for by already existing programs, another part by the savings in labor and administration costs when the welfare, un employment offices and other similar offices are closed and with those closings no more having to pay obscene government pensions to all those employees.
Everyone would receive it in order to reduce paperwork and administration costs, at the end of the year of course those that really didn't need it would pay either some or all back in their taxes, but those that don't need could invest that money in a money market account for a year and keep the interest.
This has been tried in other countries, was almost passed here back in the 70's and surprisingly enough (and I looked the studies up myself) when these experiments were held the people receiving the money actually bettered themselves by getting cleaned up, off the streets and finding jobs, or they used the money to further their education or even started their own business.
Personally it surprised the hell out of me, as I figured it would fail miserably as the only people it would help were the drug dealers, prostitutes and tattoo parlors.
An experiment which will soon be conducted in Kenya instead of taking donations and giving people food, shelter and medical care they will instead give the money directly to those in need.
We've had some pretty interesting conversations on this as with all the money spent on the war on poverty, it's an abysmal failure.