Their troubling view on work:
The subsidies that enable some Americans to decide “if they will work” mean higher taxes from those who must or want to work.
Republicans immediately jumped on the finding as proof that the law is a jobs killer and cited earlier discoveries about its destructive impact. These include Obama’s lie that “you can keep your plan” and the fact that many new insurance plans come with higher premiums and deductibles and fewer doctors.
Pay more, get less will be the experience for tens of millions by the time the law is fully implemented. And don’t forget its assault on religious freedom.
All true and yet, as Carney’s defense showed, something much, much larger is at play. The impacts are symptoms. The disease is that leading Democrats view fewer workers and more dependency as a good thing. That attitude largely explains slow economic growth, record-low labor rates and the explosion of handouts over the last five years.
This anti-job, pro-dependency tilt is the crux of the nation’s polarization. In essence, it pits those who believe in the sanctity of work against those who believe in penalizing wealth and redistributing its fruits.
Not all Democrats agree with that approach, but the party is now controlled by those who do. It is the party that celebrates subsidies and rewards states for getting more people on food stamps. It opens the door wider for disability payments and fights for unemployment benefits like it once fought for jobs. It does these things not because of an emergency but because of a warped ideology.
It’s called Marxism.
Looks like the link is missing.
3 day work week: Raising taxes is hard. Which is why France killed the 3 day work week. It starves the government of funds due to radical income tax reductions, increases the number of people working in the private sector and reduces the requirement for nanny state functionary jobs being created to take up the labor surplus due to increases in productivity. We may have missed the boat this time, but the next time there’s a massive deflation a 3 day work week is something libertarian theorists should investigate.
With our current crop of lying politicians, we would submit to the three day work week for the same pay as the 40-hour work week and then Obama would explain that three days is 72 hours, and then lie some more and claim he’d been quite clear on that point, and add that he never meant to imply that you’d be working those 72-hours every week, just a week here and there throughout the year.
I disagree that it looks like Marxism, because Marxists would line up anyone who isn’t working and put them in a labor camp or shoot them in the back of the head. It’s more like what Marxists would want an American government to do so its economy would collapse and its military power and society would implode, so the Soviets could catch up and the proletariat would revolt.
I’ve always held that the Marxism preached in Marxist countries was designed to boost their production (though that was a miserable failure), while the Marxism that Marxists preached in the West was designed to hobble our production. Basically, our Marxists would’ve been the first ones put up against the wall and shot for sabotage and counter-revolutionary agitation as soon as real Marxists showed up from abroad, whose mantra would be that the workers would meet their quotas under the five year plan or else get liquidated and replaced by harder workers.
I disagree that it looks like Marxism, because Marxists would line up anyone who isn’t working and put them in a labor camp or shoot them in the back of the head.
That’s the ultimate end state when they fail to create the New Soviet Man, but we’re not there yet.
Yeah. We’re in the Free EBT stage of Marxism.
OMG!! I can’t believe that’s been on YouTube since 2011.
The sharp subsidize cutoff means that people near the threshold have an economic incentive to keep their income below the limit. In some cases, making as little as a single dollar over the limit can cost them thousands more for health insurance. In those cases, it’s completely rational for people to keep their income below the limit. So, at the same time people are costing the government (really, the rest of us taxpayers) more money, they’ll also be paying less in taxes. A program that encourages greater expenditure and lower revenues – what could possibly go wrong?
The same kinds of perverse incentives exist in many means tested welfare programs such as food stamps. A better approach would be a tapered reduction of benefits with increased income but that isn’t the government way. Beggars are easier to please.
The Obamacare subsidies do have a taper.
So do the trailing end of my bowel movements.
A lot of people are reporting a very sharp dropoff at the threshold amounts, to the point of earning a single additional dollar will cost them thousands of dollars a year more for health insurance.
Remember, that not all people are buying individual plans. Many people are buying policies for families. Passing a subsidy threshold raises the costs for all of the policies they purchase. It all adds up pretty quick. Good thing we have the governmemt interfering to drive up costs.
One problem is that many of the subsidized plans were cheaper prior to the Affordable Care Act. Also, many of the people who are going through this already had insurance before the Affordable Care Act that they paid for without subsidies. So, a large group of people who had insurance prior to the Affordable Care Act are now finding their insurance options unaffordable and less affordable, rather ironic.
Groucho-Marxism. I’m reminded of the rant about “wage slaves” in Cocoanuts.
Somewhere the Gods of the Copybook Headings are laughing.
This is a good place to link an outstanding post by Monty at Ace of Spades this morning.
Say’s Law of Markets, And Why Money and Wealth Are Not the Same Thing
And while I’m at it, I threw a little something together last weekend. I formatted Francisco d’Anconia’s money speech from Atlas Shrugged on a single sheet of paper. I originally did it to hang in the lobby where I work, but then also decided to put it up on Scribd.
Francisco’s Speech
Feel free to read it, download it, print it, e-mail it, put it on your Facebook page, or whatever. I’d love to see it go viral. Our country is in dire need of these ideas now.