They will just have to find another job.
I don't really disagree with your points, but this is an extremely naive statement. Many of these people are too old to make a radical career shift that will keep them in the middle class. When ever there is a radical shift in a large employment industry, there is economic devistation for a lot fo families. The steel industry is a good example of this. Yes most of them found new jobs, but the shift in economic buying power was dramatic and lasted for generations.
There are a finite amount of houses in the world, and a greater number of people who want a house.
Scarcity is the economic concept that there is insufficient productive resources to meet all human wants and needs. I think we agree on that. I think your contention here is the "want" rather than the "need".
Of course there is a finite number of houses in the world. There is a finite amount of eveything. However, according to the Cenus Bureau, as of Q4 of 2013, the rental unit vacancy rate was 8.2% and more than 300,000 homes are foreclosed and unoccupied according to RealtyTrac. That's 8.2% of rental units that would be making more money than they are now if the rent on them was $10/month and 300,000 homes that are wasted livable space. There is no real shortage of housing in terms of need. People might want bigger and better, but there is no excuse for there to not exist housing that eveyone can afford.
There is no scarcity of food. We throw tons of it away constantly. The only thing holding us back from supplying as much food (with current production levels) as the world could ever need is a societal problem where we cannot bring ourselves to help eachother out. Current food needs are fully funded (by the people who are throwing away food). The only expense that should exist in providing food to low income families is logistics.
The only thing stopping us from solving the human population's basic needs is greed. Our society has been taking great pride in this greed for the last several hundred years and I don't expect the problem to be solved within my lifetime. But humanity should at least admit its problem and lower its head in shame rather than taking pride in climbing on top of other people.
This particular strategy has been twice under Obama and once under Bush.
The pocket change they threw at us was hardely enough to make a serious effort. Between QE1, QE2, and QE3, the Fed pumped upwards of $2 trillion into the monetary system (and rising). That's on the order of $6500 for every man woman and child in the country. If that money was alocated for debt forgiveness rather than creating new debt, it's enough money to make a meaningful dent in personal liabilities to free up cash for consumer spending. $200 one year $400 the next does nothing to this end. It helps (as was shown), but it does not seriously entertain freeing up regular cash for consumer spending.
The rabble are rousing, we must unleash the opiates for the masses!
They aren't very smart if they think marijuana contains opiates.
All that stuff on the shelves in your supermarket will be gone by the end of the week, you just never see it because it's replenished exactly fast enough to keep the shelves fully stocked.
This is wrong. A lot of it is thrown away or donated to food pantries. The model for keeping customers from going to the next door competitor is to never ever let the customer be unable to get something because it's out of stock.
There are over a billion people living on a dollar a day. Claiming that we have "over production" at the global level is absurd.
To be fair, this is just an artifact of a wacky worldwide monetary system. $1 a day doesn't sound like much, but many people are able to live on it. In parts of the world however, this would be impossible even if you took income taxes out of the picture.
To make a long story short, he did in one day what a team of 3 or 4 took a week to do back in the 90s. That's a 75% reduction of workers needed for software development right there. Automation is affecting all workers at all levels; well not the management guys, of course.
It's worse than that. It's a 98% reduction in total work paid for.
FORTRAN is not a flower but a weed -- it is hardy, occasionally blooms, and grows in every computer. -- A.J. Perlis