Perhaps the best “satirical” piece I have read in the last year! Thank you Tony Simon!
Americans With No Abilities Act To Become LawPresident Barack Obama and the Democratic Senate are considering sweeping legislation that will provide new benefits for many Americans.The “Americans With No Abilities Act” is being hailed as a major legislative coup by advocatesof the millions of Americans who lack any real skills or ambition.
“Roughly 50 percent of Americans do not possess the competence and drive
necessary to carve out a meaningful role for themselves in society,” saidCalifornia Sen. Barbara Boxer. “We can no longer stand by and allow People of Inability (POI) to be ridiculed and passed over. With this legislation, employers will no longer be able to grant special favors to a small group of workers, simply because they have some idea of what they are doing.”In a Capitol Hill press conference, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid pointed to the success of the U.S. Postal Service, which has a long-standing policy of providing opportunity without regard to performance. At the state government level, the Department of Motor Vehicles also has an excellent record of hiring Persons with No Ability (63 percent).
Under the “Americans With No Abilities Act”, more than 25 million mid-level positions will be created, with important-sounding titles but little real responsibility, thus providing an illusory sense of purpose and performance.Mandatory non-performance-based raises and promotions will be given to
guarantee upward mobility for even the most unremarkable employees.The legislation provides substantial tax breaks to corporations that promote asignificant number of Persons of Inability (POI) into middle-management positions, and gives a tax credit to small and medium-sized businesses that agree to hire one clueless worker for every two talented hires.Finally, the “Americans With No Abilities Act” contains tough new measures to make it more difficult to discriminate against the non-abled, banning, for example, discriminatory interview questions such as, “Do you have any skills or experience that relate to this job?”
“As a non-abled person, I can’t be expected to keep up with people who have something going for them,” said Mary Lou Gertz, who lost her position as a lug-nut twister at the GM plant in Flint, Mich., due to her inability to remember ‘righty tighty, lefty loosey’. “This new law should be real good for people like me: “l finally have job security.”
With the passage of this bill, Gertz and millions of other untalented citizens will finally see a light at the end of the tunnel.Said Sen. Dick Durbin: “As a senator with no abilities, I believe the same privileges that elected officials enjoy ought to be extended to every American with no abilities. It is our duty as lawmakers to provide each and every American citizen, regardless of his or her inadequacy, with some sort of space to take up in this great nation and a good salary for doing so.”
(Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and Kathleen Sebelius (Secretary of HHS), who was hired as a POI to design and establish the Obamacare enrollment web site, are
stellar examples of this program.)
No, Eric you cannot make this stuff up!
Now that I’ve collected myself after tears of laughter, I’m thinking this is entirely possible in our new insano world. God help us..
I personally really hope that He does!
Here’s a link to the Rolling Stone article…. you have to read it to believe it:
note: it’s not satire. The guy who wrote it is actually serious. My favorite crazy line in the piece is a quote from a Duke University Professor:
A universal basic income would address this epidemic at the root and provide everyone, in the words of Duke professor Kathi Weeks, “time to cultivate new needs for pleasures, activities, senses, passions, affects, and socialities that exceed the options of working and saving, producing and accumulating.”
Duke University is paying that person a salary — think about that for a second.
A M A Z I N G!
You making this up Eric!
I agree with the proffeser. I think Bertrandt Russel wrote in the 50s about part time work paying enought to live. Anyway, with robots getting so good there may not be room or need for human labour.
Exactly B. Automation and robotics are doing a great job of getting rid of workers and/or pushing down wages. The problem with that is the consumer economy upon which manufacturers depend is being weakened. We do indeed need a mechanism to keep distributing money (in order to keep the goods coming) or the end result will be plenty of production but no buyers to absorb it all. That mechanism is already well known to all of us. It is called taxation and wealth redistribution via social programs. On that basis the professors ideas have some merit but probably not for the reasons he mentions. Lets just take this to its logical conclusion to see how the future may unfold with most production being automated or done by robots (including restaurants and farm work nowadays). If everyone is eventually put out of a job due to technologies and computers then we will have to accept that as a failure of our collective genius in creating the means of our own idling. Are workers to be blamed for the lack of work where no income generating jobs exist? Some of us began speculating about how the future would unfold when the fist small compters were first being introduced 30 years back. A lot of the worries have indeed come to pass. I think it is obvious that traditional employment levels where most people aged 18 to 65 were fully employed most of their lives cannot ever be achieved again. That usually spells trouble but it need not be the case. We will probably continue to migrate towards fewer weekly hours, longer holidays, more job sharing etcetera as we will also see social programs expanded to include those who have been ejected from the system. The automation of the work place is not ending anytime soon so we had better get used to the idea of there not being enough jobs to go around. This is really creating a huge dilemma at policy levels. It is why the service economy is being embraced by most Western governments as an answer to keep the revenues flowing and keeping as many people occupied as possible.
Snopes pans this as having no basis in fact.
So The Rolling Stone article does not exist or is fake?
It’s satire-for now…
I’m referring to the posted article, not rolling stone..
Gotcha!
No — it’s real. I saw the guy interviewed on CNBC this week. You can look at other sources regarding the article. (You should be able to go to the CNBC website and see the video, as well)
I just went to the home page of the website, at http://www.rollingstone.com
from there, click on the ‘Politics’ link and you will see the article link. right now, it is the 4th one down in the article list
I went and found a link to the video on CNBC:
http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000233870
I think we are going to have to look at society working differantly than it does now. If we intend to continue as a species on this planet anyway.
It will probobly require some “out of the box” thinking.
b, you are absolutely correct. The most “out of the box” solution is to seek the wisdom of the Almighty. PRAY…
Not out of the box to me and, I will bet, not to you either!
I agree B. The US payroll to population figure currently stands at about 44% which means that 44% of all citizens are employed full time. This would obviously be in contrast to our more agricultural past where virtually everyone employable (including the elderly and grade school students) would have counted in the labour force. Technologically based societies tend to idle their workers and reduce the most physically demanding of occupations by offshoring work or trading hard labour for goods. The tend is only accelerating. Automation is growing in the developing nations as well where unemployment was traditionally labour oriented, poor and agricultural. In theory, almost nobody will work in the end. Certainly not at the old occupations. The question and problem that poses though is who will consume if there are not incomes?
They had a fellow on CNBC this week, who I believe had written an article in Rolling Stone, arguing that everyone (including the unemployed) should have a guaranteed income and in that way, people would feel more comfortable about pursuing whatever they’d like to do.
You can’t make this stuff up.
I guess if you look at the labor participation rate, we are somehow headed in that direction — as fewer and fewer people are actually working.