MINIMUM GUARANTEED INCOME

For some time I have thought that there should be some sort of minimum income for adults, enough to keep someone in a modest home, keep in basic foods, and maybe a tiny bit for extras (i.e. have a modest TV, and, perhaps,  going to a movie once a month or something like that).  The reason for this is that automation is eliminating many jobs (letting your fingers do the walking on the telephone)  and others are now turned over the the consumer (e.g. pumping your own gas) not to be spent on booze, beer, or cigarettes.   Of course there are the jobs off-shored to low wage countries, and it would be poor to eliminate the low cost products as a result. Most adults won't be satisfied with minimal living and will seek work, but if the work is not available, they have this safety net.

Well it turns out just this sort of thimg has been proposed by others:

A tsunami of economic disruption is barreling toward the United States, and, as Pimco co-founder Bill Gross observed in his May "Investment Outlook," "No one in 2016 is really addressing the future as we are likely to experience it … Virtually every industry in existence is likely to become less labor-intensive in future years as new technology is assimilated into existing business models."
A 2013 Oxford University study concluded that 47 percent of jobs in the U.S. are at risk of being eliminated due to software, robotics and machines learning artificial intelligence. A McKinsey Global Institute study delivered similar results and went further to say that, if artificial intelligence progresses and is able to process and understand natural language a little better, that number could quickly jump to 58 percent of work activities that are automatable.*
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Here's what I propose to both finally end poverty now and as insurance later to ease the difficult transition of what the experts are predicting in job loss — a universal basic income. Universal basic income may be the biggest "new" idea of the 21st century, although it traces its history to Thomas Paine, Milton Friedman and Richard Nixon, whose bill twice passed the U.S. House of Representatives.
How would it work? Each month, every adult would get a check for $1,000 — that's $12,000 a year, just above the poverty line. It's that simple. A form of universal basic income has been in place in Alaska since 1976, paid as a dividend from oil revenues from the North Shore. In 2014, that dividend provided $1,884 to 640,000 individuals using funds from a single revenue stream. By eliminating 126 current welfare programs that would be made redundant by UBI; instituting a financial transaction tax, which our country already had for 50 years; eliminating many, or all, federal tax expenditures and levying a value added tax (VAT), we could provide the funding necessary for a UBI.

http://www.cnbc.com/2016/06/22/why-we-should-give-every-adult-1000month-for-free-commentary.html

REVOLT OF THE REPUBLICAN GREAT "UNWASHED"

A large segment of the Republican "base" is the disaffected white wage earner (the so-called great unwashed in that they have only finished high school or maybe not even that) and another is the "Sit down and shut up!" crowd like Chris Christie that can be quite wealthy.  Exactly why the white working class is Republican, I have no idea because the party, well, hates them and thinks they are overpaid.  Even their hero, Donald Trump, has said at least a couple of times that the American worker's wages are too high compared to the rest of the world.  For some reason they forgive him for this although their wages have been essentially stagnant for 25 yrs. But every two to four years they stroke the wage earner's ego by telling them they are the "Real Americans" and the "Backbone Of The Country."

My guess as to why the white wage earners are disaffected from their natural ally, the Democratic Party, is that they feel the Democrats pay too much attention to women, African Americans, Hispanics, and homo sexuals who have taken many jobs from them.

The rreal problem is, however, two fold.  First there is the off-shoring of jobs and the second is automation.   There is also sort of third problem where jobs have been turned over to the consumer to do.  Some examples of this are "letting your fingers do the walking" on the telephone, pump your own gas,  auto-checkout outs at grocery stores and typing your own stuff (disappearance of clerk typists) among others.  To some extent these disappearing jobs are automated, but it is still the consumer that does any work required. Wages must be less then the costs of automation, and their wages will decrease until they approach some sort of equilibrium with low wage countries moderated by the costs of shipping, the price of natural gas, etc.*  Neither party seems to have an answer to this.

So I think that the disaffected white wage earner doesn't have a party anymore, although I suspect they would do better with the Democratic Party than the Republican Party.

But an interesting thing has happened in that the disaffected white wage earner now has sort of a champion who talks like they talk and the "Sit down and shut up" crowd likes it also.  These two groups are trying to take over the Republican Party.  Time will tell if they succeed, but for now the Republican "establishment" doesn't know what to do and I'm not sure the Democratic establishment does either.

* http://stopcontinentaldrift.blogspot.com/2010/10/dumbing-down-of-america-if-you-listen.html