JOBS JOBS JOBS

There can be no economic recovery without jobs. The Chinese have an ancient story about so called improvements in a community. The story goes thusly: A foreigner came to a small village which had no plumbed in water and each day two water carriers went to the community well to fill buckets of water to carry to each home in the village. The foreigner watched this and pondered it. He then asked for a meeting with the village elders, where he explained that he could guide them in the installing of pipes to each home so that water would no longer have to be delivered in this slow and cumbersome manner. The elders told him they would consider his thoughts and his plan and let him know of their decision the following day. That day they told him his plan had failed to consider one very important thing: what would happen to the two water carriers? They made their living by carrying water to each household, which paid them a small amount per household. If the pipe replaced them, then how could they survive?


Such is the case in our country as well. We have replaced grocery checkers with automatic scanners and bank tellers with automatic teller machines, and manufacturing workers with robots. Now, with all these workers now out of work, who will have the income to buy the groceries or the manufactured products or to have bank accounts? There is a short-sightedness in our country and other nations have seen that our system is a reactive not a proactive one, with only short range planning instead of long range planning. If we do not take account of the effects of the decisions that are made, then we will wind up paying in ways that could be seriously damaging.