Automating jobs? Here’s an idea

I called my uncle the other day and he was just going out to buy lottery tickets. He passed the phone to my aunt, so I said, 'You know auntie, the lottery is for suckers! You can tell him I said - man to man, soldier to soldier - that the lottery simply cannot compete against compound interest.”

Bewildered and somewhat insulted, my aunt changed the subject to banal pleasantries about day-to-day nothings. After we hung up, I wondered why I'm not capitalizing on this opportunity, myself. Then I remembered.

After I was discharged from the Army and moved from where I'd been stationed, I found myself short on cash. The most logical move, it seemed to me, was to liquidate all those mutual funds I had built up with my Operation Enduring Freedom deployment money. I did, and when tax day came my local tax prep company informed me that my former mutual fund managers had charged me such high service fees it consistently brought my interest accruing funds down to zero.

Luckily, later, when I started to invest substantial money into my folio, they became less aggressive with service fees and my nest egg started to grow.

Remember the 2008 recession? Remember Enron? Most of the white-collar CEOs and other executives have their fortunes secured and their jobs still intact after getting away with murder. Meanwhile, across the nation, Americans are going berserk over the idea that foreigners (and not just any foreigners, but a very specific demographic) are 'taking” their jobs.

Meanwhile, the tech industry is quickly improving and expanding their automated services that would wipe out entry-level jobs which require minimal experience and effort - aka, where employees used to be able to start in order to work their way up in a company. Why not automate monetary investment programs so that we could reasonably expect that investments would be secure?

Why not automate the jobs of the lower-level employees, supervisors, managers and owners who survived the scandals (and weren't incarcerated)? Who is keeping them accountable? How do we know for certain they didn't just rebrand and apply their methods again, tucking their wealth away in offshore accounts?

' After earning a bachelor's degree, Julius Cavira volunteered with AmeriCorps, YMCA, Camphill Communities and finally enlisted in the U.S. Army (active duty) where he was deployed to Iraq twice, in 2004-05 and 2007-08. He was honorably discharged in 2009 and lives with his wife in Cedar Rapids.