Cory Farley

Special to the RGJ

I've given this a lot of thought, read everything I could find, asked financially competent friends, and I don't see a way around it:

Government has to start giving us money.

Not right away (though it will give me some tomorrow, unless the Repubs kill Social Security overnight). But I don't see another longterm solution.

This first occurred to me at Home Depot. With just a couple of items, I headed to self-checkout. As I scanned my $3.27 worth of wrong-size bolts, I realized that one checker was overseeing four registers. Had my impatience cost three jobs?

Should have seen it coming. I'm old enough to remember the utopian world predicted in the 1950s. The nation was giddy with post-war optimism, and magazines were filled with flying cars, wrist telephones and "labor-saving devices" for the "busy housewife." Machines ("robot" had been around since 1920, but wasn't in common use) would do the laundry, cooking and cleaning. Dad would get a break with automated lawnmowers and vehicles "guided by invisible radio waves."

The real magic, though, was in the workplace: mechanized janitors, carpenters, even nurses. People reclined on their patios or lolled around manicured golf courses on Wednesday afternoons.

Innocent that I was, it didn't occur to me that if nobody was lifting that barge or toting that bale, nobody would be writing that paycheck.

We've come to accept things like automated car washes and pinsetters in bowling alleys (people used to do those jobs). We've all read about mechanized fast-food restaurants, Big Burger's answer to the living wage.

Somehow, though, I'd never contemplated what that means.

I figured things would be tough at the bottom. In high school, I worked in a Shell station that employed 12 people. The same station today has three full-timers and a couple of weekend kids. Even jobs that seemed bulletproof are vulnerable. You should get your car tuned regularly, but it will go 100,000 miles if you don't. Who fixes appliances anymore? My thymus was removed by (pick one) a human-assisted robot or robot-assisted human. A decade ago that required evisceration. I can't even find a scar.

The knee-jerk response to automation-related job loss is "Go back to school," but that's simplistic. The world needs a finite number of engineers, only so many MBAs, fewer lawyers than it already has. A White House report in 2010 said workers making less than $20 an hour have an 83 percent chance of losing their jobs to a machine.

Which brings us to a system often called Universal Basic Income. It's the idea -- already being tried in several countries and studied in others -- that everybody gets a certain amount of money.

As I understand it (probably incompletely), recipients would get the money whether or not they work, but then they'd sink or swim. Taxes on the wealthy and the working would probably go up, but since UBI would replace welfare, maybe not as much as you think. Qualifying everybody would dramatically reduce welfare's administrative costs and shrink the system.

There's a decent explanation of this online at Wikipedia, of all places, and it's not a perfect solution. If you have a better one, though, governments all over the world would like to hear it.

Cory Farley is a freelance writer who lives in Verdi.