I find the "too big to fail" spectacle alarming myself - surely when a company has become so big that its problems threaten us all, it is so big that the company itself is a problem for us all - perhaps it cannot be allowed to fail, but nor can it safely be allowed to continue as it is: each and every bailout should have come as one part of a breakup like AT&T, to restructure the problem company into pieces which can survive and operate in future without threatening us in that way.

Automation alone makes the number of jobs go down ever so steadily - and number of people rises. We may end up with a society where jobs are just not an option through a person's entire life.
No, automation removes existing jobs from the market over time - and at a faster rate when there is lower unemployment, because of supply and demand. How many people work maintaining horse-drawn carriages now, or stoking coal-fired steam engines? Virtually none, of course, compared to 1911 - but equally, back then there were almost no diesel or jet engines being maintained, no oil rigs being crewed... Old jobs become obsolete, new ones take their place. Meanwhile, unemployment holds down wages - which makes additional automation less economically attractive. Right now, I can buy a little device which will mow my lawn for me unattended for something like $1000 - or I can pay someone $30 to do it manually each time. With unemployment the way it is, the guy who mows it hasn't put prices up for a while (though since he has only shown up twice since May, unemployment may be his fate anyway) - so automation hasn't cost him that (part of a) job. A few years down the line, unemployment will have dropped, he'll be wanting $50 and that machine will cost $500, so it will be time to replace him.

The total number of jobs has actually increased greatly. One part of the problem is a growing population: the US needs to create something like 100,000 new jobs every month just to employ the new people who join the workforce - and over the last century, it has indeed managed exactly that: there may be millions unemployed right now, but there are several times as many employed people as there were a few decades ago as well. Many millions of new jobs have been created - but so have millions of new people wanting to fill them. Sadly, there are already people (in the UK at least) who do indeed go through life without finding or even seeking employment

One thing really disgusted me recently, in a little news feature (here in the UK) about the economy. To illustrate the plight of "poor" people, they featured two women on low incomes, said how much money they were getting, then talked to them about how they were cutting costs and struggling. The disgusting detail was that the one with the job - hence actually paying tax, though only a little of it - had a lower income than the non-working one paying nothing to the government. To camouflage this fact, the presenter quoted the first woman's income annually and the second weekly, no doubt knowing most of the audience wouldn't convert to compare the two directly. I think that's what Thorne is getting at: when she is being handed a better income and lifestyle on a plate without making the slightest bit of effort, why would she even try to imitate the one with the job and work hard to earn it? For all our politicians' fine words, we still have "non working households", where income is something the government gives you for nothing and work is something other people do. The government provides them with housing - rent-free because they're on welfare - waives the tax on that housing for the same reason - then gives them free spending money to live on as well. Economic suicide!