Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1364-1366

Q: Will the world ever get to “technological unemployment” because of advanced automation?

A: [Stephen Hawking] If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.
Stephen Hawking: ‘Technology seems to drive inequality’
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There’s a whole treasure trove of government handouts that aren’t dispensed through spending, but rather through the tax code. That doesn’t make them any less “free” than a rent voucher or an Electronic Benefit Transfer card.
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Tax credits mainly help the poor, but the rest help the well off: According to the Congressional Budget Office, more than half of the benefits of these expenditures go to the richest 20 percent of American households.
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Poor families might be able to get Section 8 apartment vouchers or spots in public housing, but the mortgage interest deduction overwhelmingly helps people who make more than $100,000 a year buy their homes.
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What the government loses to tax expenditures dwarfs spending on welfare programs. Each year, it spends about $17 billion on assistance to needy families and more than $70 billion on food stamps, compared with more than $900 billion that flows out through the tax code. It expends nearly three times as much on tax subsidies for homeowners as it does for rental assistance for the poor.
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In a 2008 poll, 57 percent of people said they had never availed themselves of a government program, yet 94 percent of those same people had in fact benefited from at least one — mostly through what the Cornell professor Suzanne Mettler has called the “submerged state,” or the huge but often invisible network of money spent through the tax code.
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There are a couple of things in his plan that would benefit low-income Americans, like a boost to the earned-income tax credit. But thanks to proposed changes such as lowering the top income tax rate, ending the estate tax paid by the wealthiest 0.2 percent and even further reducing the rate for investment income, the biggest benefit would be handed to those who are already counted in the richest 1 percent slice of America. And it would come at a cost of at least $1.6 trillion over a decade, according to analysis by the Tax Foundation.
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Ronald Reagan conjured the boogeyman of the welfare queen...Yet he also, of course, proposed and passed huge tax cuts, which mostly lowered the burden on the wealthiest Americans and did little for everyone else. The top income rate dropped from 70 percent to 28 over the course of his presidency and has never gotten back up anywhere near that level since.
We All Get ‘Free Stuff’ From the Government
BRYCE COVERT
New York Times
OCT. 8, 2015
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Tragedies Draw Attention to Wall Street’s Grueling Pace
By WILLIAM D. COHAN
A rash of suicides and seizures has raised concern about jobs known for long hours and heavy workloads and how they affect the junior workers who do them.
New York Times headline
October 3, 2015 
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