As computers permeate more of our everyday lives it becomes necessary to understand them on some level.
You can say the same thing about any number of technologies that permeate our (western, and increasingly developed) lives - plumbing, electrical, cars, landscaping etc. While it's true that we should have some understanding of these technologies (checking the fluid levels in a car, snaking s small pipe, running A/V on your PC), expecting everyone to learn programing is like expecting everyone to learn pipefitting, carpentry, etc.
There is only so much time one has, folks should focus on their passions and let the experts take care of everything else.
With only an intuition for basic mathematics, the ability to read, and maybe a layman's understanding of fundamental physics one can come to understand enough about carpentry and plumbing to solve their own problems.
The same isn't true for computers. We don't teach computation in schools. To learn programming you have to scratch your own itch or wait until you get to college (in most places). There's no intuition about computation, no fundamentals that are taught and widely adopted. The average person doesn't sit down at their computer and understands what is going on, even in some small intuitive way, when they save their spreadsheet or click on a link in their email that takes them to their banking site (and subsequently they cannot even put together why, months later, they are the victim of bank fraud). Without even a basic understanding of the fundamental principles of computation these people have no idea how this technology is affecting their lives.
I'm not saying that everyone needs to be a professional programmer any more than everyone needs to be a master carpenter. We don't teach math in early education in the hopes that every child becomes a mathematician. We do it because it gives them tools to navigate their world and overcome the challenges of modern life. So too must we teach them computation. We don't want them all to become programmers but it is useful to know so that they can have the intuition to solve their own problems and start using computers as tools.
Your conclusion on time is exactly why learning basic programming stuff like Variables, If then and For loops are powerful.
That is because unlike plumbing, electrical, cars, landscaping and like reading, writing and numeracy, basic programming augments your cognitive toolkit. In the least, it enhances rigorous and corner case thinking. It also makes learning abstract concepts easier, it allows one to reach beyond analytic solutions of equations and to access large amounts of data and automate the handling of said data.
If a computer can enhance many aspects of people's lives then they get more utility in having more powerful basic mechanisms of interaction for automating a program's behaviour. Having basic computer literacy would have definite positive utility for society.
Learning to program is not like learning to fix a car, it is like learning to drive a car instead of hiring a driver.
You can say the same thing about any number of technologies that permeate our (western, and increasingly developed) lives - plumbing, electrical, cars, landscaping etc. While it's true that we should have some understanding of these technologies (checking the fluid levels in a car, snaking s small pipe, running A/V on your PC), expecting everyone to learn programing is like expecting everyone to learn pipefitting, carpentry, etc.
There is only so much time one has, folks should focus on their passions and let the experts take care of everything else.