Alex Castellanos says that Trump’s success will not be defined by anything he said at his inaugural speech or at the CIA but what he accomplishes in office. That may be true but what he accomplishes in office will depend on whether or not the nation can actually believe anything he says. This man is an inveterate liar and you can’t be that and win in the Presidency.
Matthew Dowd hit the nail on the head when he said that Trump talks about being the leader of a movement for change but what is really going on is that his election was a reaction to change, change that is sweeping across the world, change brought about by a technological revolution the likes of which we have not seen since the early 1800s.
Trump got elected, mainly by promising to get back all the jobs that had disappeared during the Bush led crash. It was a rash promise, based, like most of what Trump has said, on facts not in evidence. The basis for that promise was, the jobs that had been lost to foreign competition and Trump, because he sees himself as a master negotiator, would be able to negotiate those jobs back to these shores. Unfortunately the entire premise is false and Trump knows it. The jobs didn’t go to cheap labor ports, at least not for the most part. What really happened was that robots are now doing those jobs, and so they are gone forever. Trump knew this before he made those promises but in his election campaign he depended on always addressing desperate people who were willing to accept any crap, no matter how false, on the off chance that there would be a miracle and Trump would be able to deliver. Of course he can’t and he never will. For those without the education it will only get worse and their savior, Trump, continues to sell them out.
Right now, as I write this blog, Trump is selling out his out of work base at every turn. In some areas what he is doing is stupendously egregious.
One of the main areas in which this is true is energy. It doesn’t take Nostradamus to tell us that more jobs are being created in renewable energy than in fossil, or that wind and solar are now cheaper to use than oil, gas or coal. It’s no longer news that six million jobs have been created in solar and wind while we are losing jobs in fossils. But still Trump is pushing the oil barrel, giving the go-ahead to the Dakota pipeline, creating profits for companies that are neither American nor safe, endangering the entire Oglala Aquifer and for what? So a couple of Canadian companies can extract poisonous Canadian oil, ship it across America and sell it to the Far East? Oh yeah, and they will create 35 permanent jobs for Americans, while they make billions and endanger the water system for the breadbasket of America and millions of consumers. Yeah, that makes Trumpian sense.
But it’s not only in energy that Trump is making the wrong bets. Right now, the biggest job producer in most of the country is in driving; either delivery trucks or people moving. In ten years that will no longer be true. In twenty there will be no need for anyone to have a driver’s license because all vehicles will be computer driven. Those are also jobs that won’t come back because computers are much safer than human drivers by a ratio of 9 to 1. And if our car companies don’t get on the ball and move their computer driven car lines faster, even the few jobs left making cars will disappear to foreign manufacturing.
One of the biggest job areas of the future will be in computer security. Even now thousands of jobs in that field go begging because we don’t have the people with the education to fill them. It’s going to get much worse especially when you consider that Trump has nominated a mindless bimbo who knows nothing about education to be his Secretary of Education. With Betsy DeVos leading us directly into the fourth century we will fall even further behind other countries than we already have.
John Tanny of Forbes Magazine has written a brilliant explanation of how the existence and proliferation of robot labor will be the engine that drives all future economy, just as technical innovation drove the past. Tanny’s point is that technical innovation creates higher profits, which in turn leads to more investment in new technologies that tend to solve more problems and lead to more profits, which lead to new technologies that create new jobs. The new jobs are better because they are physically easier and leave us more leisure time than the old.
This is a cycle that has been recurring and refining itself since the first labor saving inventions of man but which really took a huge leap ahead in the Industrial Revolution of the 1800’s which saw enormous technological advances. The same thing is happening now only by a multiple of a hundred and we have to be ready for it. That readiness is exemplified by the need for the right education. Learning how to do the next work will be the key to personal advancement in the near and far future.
There will always be a few farm jobs requiring humans and there will definitely be a boom in personal service jobs but they will always be low level and will never be what the educated will aspire to. The Internet is overflowing with information about what will be the employment of the future. All it takes is the will to read about it and search out the educational avenues that must be traveled to attain it. Trump will not save your jobs! Capitalism and technology are doing that now. It’s up to you to grab the ring before it gets too far out of reach. Voting for Trump almost knocked you out of the game but there’s still time and possibility. Trump will not get you a job. He is doing his best to destroy what work still exists so his billionaire friends can steal your last buck. You have to get that job yourself.