If you think STEM degrees will be made worthless by automation then you need to think again. Automation is created and maintained by people with STEM degrees or backgrounds.

All bailouts, handouts, subsidies, and other government giveaways need to end for everyone individuals and companies. Food stamps alone are a pittance sure, but where do you draw the line? So far we spend half our budget on entitlements and we have yet to draw a line.

Yes a laptop is still a luxury item. You can access computers at any public library. Having a cell phone is becoming necessary, but that doesn't mean you have to have a $600 iPhone when a simple flip phone will suffice to keep you connected. You are really missing my point though by focusing on the need to have a laptop or cellphone. Those were just examples. A laptop and a cell phone are not breaking people. What is breaking people is the fact that they insist on living beyond their means across the board. They have a house they can barely afford, a car payment, an expensive cell phone, take yearly vacations, and on and on. They live paycheck to paycheck not because they don't make enough money, but because they spend every dime they make rather than saving.

Taking out a loan to get a degree that will never do anything to allow you to pay off that debt is foolish. There are STEM majors out there up to their eyeballs in debt that they will spend the rest of their lives trying to pay off even with a job in a STEM field because they chose to go to a very expensive school rather than a state school. No one particular major is immune to bad debt, but there are majors that are much more likely to be poor investments. Poets and artists in no way require a degree by the way.

People have been brainwashed to believe that getting a college degree is necessary for success and that if you get said degree you will be successful. Both of these ideas are wrong. Most job growth in the next decade or so will be in the skilled trades. Plumbers, electricians, carpenters, mechanics, millwrights, machinists, etc. are going to be in extremely high demand because so many of them are retiring and there is no one trained to replace them because of the two fallacies I mentioned above.

The reality is people do not want to delay their gratification until they can afford it. That is why so many households have tons of debt and no savings. They are unwilling to live frugally, below their means in order to build wealth. This is not true of everyone, but of most households it is. Debt is bad. Easy credit exists because the credit card companies love that sweet, sweet interest that their slaves pay them every month. Personal debt and refusing to delay gratification is a large reason why the middle class is shrinking and the lower classes are not moving up.

No one is going to repossess our tanks. What will happen is people will eventually lose faith in our ability to pay our debts (eventually we will default by the way) and at that point they will downgrade our debt. No one will be willing to extend us credit, and our economy will implode followed by the world economy. Printing money is not a long term solution. Eventually inflation will catch up to you. We are not always going to be the big kid on the block. China is poised to surpass us very rapidly particularly as they begin to develop a middle class. They will be the ones driving the world economy and we will be sitting here with our national debt unable to get credit and unable to meet our obligations to the citizens who paid into the systems that were supposed to be there for them when they retire.