Posted on 02/10/2014 4:12:43 AM PST by Kaslin
From a solely material perspective, which is the only perspective that the government ought to consider, there is nothing wrong in our body politic that can’t be made at least a little better with more jobs.
But of course, as we learned last week, the Obama administration, Harry Reid and the rest of the secular rabble known as the progressive left don't want more jobs. For them jobs are a nuisance, jobs are a hindrance, jobs are the enemy.
“The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) on Tuesday said that the Affordable Care Act will contribute to the equivalent of 2 million workers out of the labor market by 2017,” reports Yahoo’s Business Insider, “as employees work fewer hours or decide to drop out of the labor force entirely.”
"CBO projections during the health care reform debate seemed to significantly underestimate the negative impact of Obamacare," says Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas, "and because of those projections, supporters were able to jam it through by one vote. Everybody knows about that vote. And now the American people have to pick up the tab on the CBO's errors....Was this political? Were the books cooked? CBO needs to take responsibility for the differences between their projections and the most recent updates."
The crux of the issue is that Americans will have to work fewer hours to keep their healthcare and welfare benefits. By the reckoning of the CBO it's the equivalent of losing 2.3 million jobs or more. Democrats are celebrating the reduction, noting that it will give workers more free time.
Because that's what unhappy people need: more free time.
With due respect to Harry Reid, Barack Obama, the CBO and other great priests of the Do-Nothing State, providing more leisure time for people to pursue hobbies like, oh, protesting Broadway Joe’s fur coat, occupying houses they didn’t pay for, or erecting a monument to Satan in Oklahoma City, might not be the best way to find our way out of the crisis of confidence that these priests have put us in
Idle hands, as they say, are the Devil’s playground.
“According to the Divine decree of our grandfather Adam,” wrote Peter the Great in 1696, “we are eating our bread in the sweat of our face.” Peter at the time was engaged in building a great fleet of ships, personally wielding an axe as a ship’s carpenter.
That’s one of the various reasons the tall, energetic czar was considered great.
Oh, think of what a website he would build.
Or an Olympics he would run.
Not so with government today.
And while I’m generally OK with the government not doing their job—or better yet any job really-- I think that they ought to at least let us do our jobs.
And that is the rub, isn’t it?
The government that can’t run our housing sector, the banking business, the healthcare system, the CIA, EPA, insurance or even a loan program to private businesses, now wants to have more responsibility for doing much more that amounts to nothing at all, while telling us all to do nothing too.
And it's not just with Obamacare policies either that they are killing productivity. Now they want to hike the minimum wage to make rising "productivity"-- the thing we need to see wages increase-- a thing of the past.
That's what the proposal by Obama to hike the minimum wage actually amounts to: higher costs for the same productivity; or to put it this way: doing nothing for more cost.
That’s like saying you can keep the insurance plan that you like, it will just cost more, with a higher deductible and a different doctor.
You’ll bleed the same when the needle pricks though.
See? Same. Exact. Plan.
Yeah.
So let’s just agree that the minimum wage plan amounts to Obamacare for the economy by other means. If you like your job, you can keep your job, except that it will be a different job, working for someone else and you’ll have a long wait on the unemployment line to go through first before you reap the benefit, especially if you are unemployed already.
Because a minimum wage hike will mostly affect the people who are least likely to be able find employment right now.
And they’ll bleed exactly the same when the needle pricks.
See? Same. Exact. Job. That is, no job at all.
All economies run on the creation and maintenance of jobs.
You want more people to have health insurance? Provide more jobs.
You want to cut our deficit? Provide more jobs.
You want increase taxes? Provide more jobs.
You want to start to stabilize the Social Security Trust Fund? Provide more jobs.
Jobs will not, in fact, solve every problem that we have in the country.
But nothing looks quite as bad if the economy is creating jobs.
Things would look brighter, more productive that way.
And, oh... that must be their problem with it. Because from where I sit, I really think this administration-- and his party-- does believe that jobs are a nuisance, jobs are a hindrance, jobs are the enemy.
They're a new god, sending us out of the new Garden of Eden. And telling us to mill about and try to look busy. They'll take care of everything else.
Now...about that website...
!
the current talking point is just there to buy liberals the needed time to craft a better talking point or to find a way to change the subject altogether. They clearly didn’t have the time to run the current talking point past a focus group.
The Obama care fiasco has had one success. It is reducing, France like, the work week to thirty hours. It is a premeditated act of socio-economic tinkering designed to increase employment by reallocating the gross work hours.
From Wiki....
Most countries in the developed world have seen average hours worked decrease greatly. For example in the U.S in the late 19th century it was estimated that the average work week was over 60 hours per week.[20] Today the average hours worked in the U.S is around 33,[21] with the average man employed full-time for 8.4 hours per work day, and the average woman employed full-time for 7.7 hours per work day.[22] The front runners for lowest average weekly work hours are the Netherlands with 27 hours,[23] and France with 30 hours.[24]
Wiki is widely thought to be often wrong, but the idea to be conveyed is the euro maximum work per week hours.
You stated what the situation is on this one,
Their talking point is insane. Well, they all are, but this one is over the edge.
Jobs are so old school.
Great idea: Make it seem like people losing their jobs or never being able to get one in the first place and having to live in poverty are really enjoying a government-paid vacation during which they can follow their bliss, as the hippies of yore used to say when they got stoned and took another macramé course. This is one of the most ignorant and insulting things Obama has said yet.
Does anyone know if this is selling well with his public? That the Dems have the chutzpah to be proclaiming this, unfortunately, makes me think that some people do regard work as the enemy and Americans as passive wimps who just want to stay stoned all day (something the government will no doubt assist them in - I bet they’ll be giving out pot vouchers before too long).
That hypothesis only works if you assume that Obama actually wants the economy to grow and unemployment numbers to come down. If you are trying to destroy a nation he’s right on course.
Social Security will never be stabilized. Just as Bernie Maddoff’s financial scheme could not be stabilized. Of course, the differences is that people weren’t forced to buy into jailbird Maddoff as we are with social security.
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