You don't need a 110 IQ to be a nurse, EMT, or many other skilled jobs.
That's what I'm afraid of
Seriously, though, my car will never drive for me.
That's a phantom number to make the government look good. It doesn't count people who are discouraged and have stopped looking for work.
A lot of people are poor due to making some bad choices when young. Having a baby, dropping out of school for one reason or another, or some other circumstance. Once poor and in the system, the system is currently designed to make it prohibitively hard to get educated and pull yourself out. Lots of people are in that situation. The need to be "taught" a skill so that they can contribute.
Actually yes you do need to be highly intelligent to be a nurse or an emt, you not only need to be intelligent you need to be able to cope with high stakes, high stress, situations where people's lives are literally on the line, and you often need to do it while being under rested and under paid (and to thankless patients no less). Not everyone can be trained or taught the skills for that job. I'm a fairly intelligent individual, and I'm not going to even remotely say I can do a nursing or emt job. I can remember all the medical knowledge, but I couldn't deal with the on the ground ins and outs of actually doing the job. There is a reason that there is a nursing shortage, and its because it takes a special kind of person to do that job.
While the 5% number is a BS number that ignores those no longer looking for work (making it at best an estimation), it does represent something... The number of people that should be looking for a job. Let's face it we live in the damn future and robots are taking our jobs. Heck my last programming/qa job was writing automation. A.K.A. creating a robot to eventually do my job for me. I was quite literally programming my own replacement. The plus side of that is that we don't all need to work anymore we have robots to do the menial and repetitive labor. All we need to be able to do is repair the robots, and that takes significantly less manpower. A reality of the future we are entering is that in that future, in the advanced countries, people without advanced degrees, and skills, won't have a lot to do work wise. As we automate and allow tech to solve more and more of our problems the need for people to also do the tasks we've set up robots to do evaporates. It is important to keep passing the skills on to humans as a means of redundancy, but robots can assemble a burger and fries for me as well as clean the table and mop the floor of the dining area I eat my food in. We've already basically removed the cashier position in a lot of stores (especially the grocery store), we replaced 5 to 10 jobs with 1 job, and those 4 to 9 other jobs are never coming back.
The jobs we are going to need filled moving forward are skilled trades like mechanics, carpenters, plumbers electricians, masons, welders, and many other things you can learn at a vocational high school (which after long enough will be eliminated by still more robots though those are a bit more down the road), and high end careers such as doctors, lawyers, nurses and the programmers and engineers that make the robots that eliminate the need for other workers. Not all of these positions are things that all people can do, there are barriers to entry, both physical and mental (depending upon the position we are talking about), and there is the simple fact that some people can't do any of those things. It isn't due to any real disability just a lack of exceptionality.
As we bustle into that future (ludite all you want that's where we are headed) we have to accept that a lot of people aren't going to be working anymore, and there literally won't be anything for them to do in the actual workforce because the need for the jobs they could do no longer exists. Those people don't deserve death by starvation simply because they are not exceptional human beings, their mediocrity is not a sin punishable by death, and as we evolve our society we need to take care of those that we've actively taken work away from via advancement in both technology and geopolitics.
Essentially your constant insistence that everyone needs to "contribute" or work towards "contributing" in order to warrant their being kept alive is an old way of thinking that just needs to go because it doesn't take into account the issue of there actively not being any work for them to do. It also ignores contributions outside of productivity within the workforce such as supporting those that are exceptional and do the jobs that require some level of exceptionality.
I'm not even saying it is a totally bad idea. More training available to those in poverty helps in a lot of ways, it not only might find people that otherwise never would have attempted work in a trade it also gives jobs to those that know a trade, but can't actually hack it on the job site (those that can't do teach). However the simple fact is that even if we train a million plumbers we won't ever need a million plumbers, and again not every person can learn any skill. I went to a vocational school, I've actively watched people that couldn't grasp ohms law, and its further implications (things you need to know to be a competent electrician), there are barriers to entry for skilled positions that some people just can't get past, and insisting that people must be trained for whatever the market demands of them ignores the simple fact that not every person can do everything.
Like I'm not saying people shouldn't try or anything like that. You'll never know for a fact that you shouldn't be doing something until you've tried doing that thing and failed at it, but it's okay to not be good at things, we aren't fighting for life in the mud anymore. I'm just saying that sometimes someone's best really isn't good enough, and we should stop trying to live by utter BS we feed children to motivate them to try things, and develop solutions that confront the cold realities.
