Moving to a Post-Work Economy, part 2: Where are we going to get money?

You cannot have a consumer economy without people having enough money to consume.

This is why we're having problems and regular recessions. The mid-twentieth century consumer economy was based on the middle and lower class splitting about 70% of the wealth of the country, letting the rich have about 30%. Now, after decades of cutting taxes on the rich to encourage "job creation" we're seeing that the rich have about 95% of the wealth and we're fighting over the last 0.5%.

If you remove 65% of the money from circulation, you can't afford a consumer economy.

I was reminded that there are more jobs than manual labor and service sector. However, service sector work comprises 80% of American jobs and manufacturing is about 12%. 

From the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the changes:

But, I'm not certain their projected employment levels account for the increase in service sector automation.

So, 95% of the money is being invested in ways that it only makes more money, not new jobs, products or innovations.
And a lot of the jobs in that 80% are in the cross-hairs to be done by robots or cheap foreign labor. Direct service work--truck driving to fast food--is for the robots. Information based service work (call centers, tech support) has been outsourced for decades.

So what happens to the rest of us when our jobs go away?
What happens when all the burger flippers and truck drivers and help desk folks and air conditioner builders are out of work? We can't all be doctors and nurse and teachers.  (the projected growth sectors, although some districts are experimenting with distance learning, where several districts share the expense of one teacher who teaches via TV for all the classes)

We can't make a living selling each other artisanal soap, romance novels and personal shopping services. Not when the majority of the money has already been siphoned to the top. You can't sell stuff to broke people.

I am reminded of a convention (naming no names) where I looked at the dealer room, looked at my booth partner and said "There are two hundred dollars in this room. They will change hands a dozen times this weekend. Our goal is to go home with as many of them as we can."

That's how it's starting to feel here at the bottom end of the middle class. We swap around goods and money. We mutually mooch. We sponsor each other's patreons for the same amount and end up with a zero sum. If I have $25 extra this month, I'll spend it at someone's etsy or go fund me. If someone has an extra $25 next month, they'll throw it my way.

The gig economy is not stable and neither is the sharing economy, not without more money in general circulation.

We have become the Unecessariat. The Gimmies in Star Trek parlance, the last to give up hope of making an honest living, the ones who will ask for any job, who hate the idea of handouts.

And the owners and 1% are just waiting for us to die out.

How do we survive?
By continuing to swap around what money we do have. By packbonding.
By normalizing the conversation around Universal Basic Income as an alternative to guillotines.

Because we are at a tipping point. There comes a time in every society when economic inequality gets so bad that the fall of that society cannot be stopped.
It happened in Rome, despite the Bread and Circuses (and we're trying to starve out our lower class)
It happened in France.

It happened in Russia.

It happened in Germany.

When the middle class feels they have lost everything, when the lower class knows they have, things change, radically and awfully.
Right now, we've got a populist demagogue who is giving the American people scapegoats for their economic pain. However... This only works for so long when you're not offering actual economic relief. Nazi Germany worked because it restructured the economy and provided jobs in the war machine as well as offering scapegoats.

I'm hoping it can still be stopped. We missed the last exit away from fascism over twenty years ago. I'm not sure we can avoid the economic collapse.

Do we get the Bell Riots that tip us to a more economically equitable society?
Do we go down the road so many third world countries have and fade away from the world scene, an enormous slum with a few rich folks in their isolated enclaves?

What do we do?

I don't have answers at this point. I have ideas, mostly unfeasible.