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Let The Unemployable Have Social Security

Should Older Unemployed Workers Get Social Security?


  • Total voters
    20
You can't always get the job you want but you can get a job. In Carters recession I had a tough time working as most of the sawmills had shut down as had logging companies. I took whatever BS job I could get during that time, I planted trees in clear cuts for the forest service, harvested Christmas trees, bucked hay and picked apples. That kind of work is still available today and still mostly done by Mexicans because most Americans are to lazy to do it.
 
And, if they can do a job, they're not, "chronically unemployable".

I'm not sure there is such a thing as "chronically unemployable" There may be people who are at a chronic disadvantage finding a job when jobs are limited but there is virtually no one who is capable of doing nothing at all. For example a friend of mine knows an old lady back in Poland who under 'Communism'* had a mentally handicapped man paid by the state to collect moss in the forest and fill the holes her wall. This may sound silly but at the end of the day she had a warm house in winter and the man had a job and somewhere to live, neither of which are the case now.

The problem we face as a civilization is not a shortage of things to do, or a shortage of people to do them but the lack of an economic system that will pay them to do these things. In a situation where we face a global food crisis, dependence on fuels that will no longer exist in the near future and ecological disaster the fact that we are paying people to do nothing is unforgivable.

* Not a system I would endorse wholeheartedly but one that certainly had some redeeming characteristics.
 
You can't always get the job you want but you can get a job. In Carters recession I had a tough time working as most of the sawmills had shut down as had logging companies. I took whatever BS job I could get during that time, I planted trees in clear cuts for the forest service, harvested Christmas trees, bucked hay and picked apples. That kind of work is still available today and still mostly done by Mexicans because most Americans are to lazy to do it.

I agree wholeheartedly with the first part, but do you think that during the great depression one if four Americans suffered from a chronic bout of laziness?
 
I agree wholeheartedly with the first part, but do you think that during the great depression one if four Americans suffered from a chronic bout of laziness?

The great depression was an entirely different event, there really was no work then and people lined up for the jobs I mentioned in my previous post.
 
The great depression was an entirely different event, there really was no work then and people lined up for the jobs I mentioned in my previous post.

So I imagined the mass of redundancies that have taken place since 2008?
 
When Mexicans stop paying coyotes to leave their own country and stop risking their lives sneaking across the desert to come here for work then and only then will I take the supposition that you can't find a job here seriously.

Sorry, this is not true. Try it out. Go for a hotel cleaning job with your mexican girlfriend or farm labor job with your mexican friend. The mexicans will be hired and you will be rejected, even though you went there with the same terms. There is an absolute (reverse) racism that operates in the unskilled and semi-skilled job markets.
 
How do you reduce undue suffering? When I talk to people with operations management background, they all seem to say that the problem with old people is that they can't work except at their own pace. In today's world where businesses have virtually eliminated their operational "frictions", the worker that can turn on a dime for any customer demand is the winner. You can't expect a regular 10-12 hour workday from an old person. Even young people fail with this when competing against cheap outsourcing.

The bottom line: when you turn 36, nature takes away 2 % of your hormones every year, giving you gray hair, wrinkles, loss-of-shape, and death (at the end). It is up to you how you manage your decline. But isn't it a loosing proposition to try to run upwards on this downward escalator? Let's allow old people to reduce their own life expectancy.

I'm not entirely sure what you're saying. I'm 53 and haven't found a young person who can up with me yet. I run ten miles a day and often leave yonger men behind. I am usually doing three to five things at once here on the computer, paying least attention to this diversion. And I can run up the down escalator. ;)

But the fact remains, people of age are unemployed. And odds of getting employed are slim for many. What should we do about it?
 
But the fact remains, people of age are unemployed. And odds of getting employed are slim for many. What should we do about it?

The question is, whose fault is it that they are unemployed? Have they kept up with the times or have they caused themselves to be left behind?
 
The question is, whose fault is it that they are unemployed? Have they kept up with the times or have they caused themselves to be left behind?

Should I go after the man who threw a brick through my window is should i make my windows stronger?
 
Sorry, this is not true. Try it out. Go for a hotel cleaning job with your mexican girlfriend or farm labor job with your mexican friend. The mexicans will be hired and you will be rejected, even though you went there with the same terms. There is an absolute (reverse) racism that operates in the unskilled and semi-skilled job markets.

Quite true, as the employer will fear that you may know what a health/safety violation is and how to report it, that you will get trained and still shop around for a position with a competitor, that you will not be a "team player" and may question being told to "cut corners" when things get busy.
 
The question is, whose fault is it that they are unemployed? Have they kept up with the times or have they caused themselves to be left behind?

I have no idea. There are many reasons why any one person might be unemployed. That'd we have to look at individually.
 
I have no idea. There are many reasons why any one person might be unemployed. That'd we have to look at individually.

I agree, you'd have to deal with this on a case-by-case basis, you can't just declare everyone over 50 without a job ought to get free money from the federal government.
 
I have no idea. There are many reasons why any one person might be unemployed. That'd we have to look at individually.

It requires far too much time (and therefore money) to investigate reasons for each person's uselessness.

Give people an incentive to save their money again: leave them alone.
 
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