How Do You Survive, Pay Rent, Etc., When You "Choose" Not To Work?
How do you just decide to quit working, and still survive?
Or reduce your hours, or go be an artist, or spend more time with your kids or grandkids, if you have to pay rent, and for groceries, and gas for a high-mileage 10-year-old car, or even just bus fare, and for a dimestore cellphone with no camera or Internet?What is Obama smoking, to think that the equivalent of 2,500,000 Americans working now will just be able to "choose" to stop working? How detached from reality can he be? Who's going to pay for them to live? Are they all just going to go on welfare and open their mouths to be fed by the rest of us who keep working, when they themselves are able-bodied enough to hold up their own bootstraps?
Oh, I forgot. That is the Obama plan, all along. Redistribute what people make to those who won't make for themselves anymore. By force of his pen and his phone. So much for ObamaCare creating all those promised jobs:
CBO Director: Obamacare "Creates A Disincentive For People To Work"
"To some, the Democrats’ glee over offering people health care so they’ll quit working reprised memories of a hilarious old headline in the satiric online magazine The Onion: “IBM Emancipates 8,000 Wage Slaves.”"There’s a serious side to this, a seriously disquieting side: For years, it seemed that although Democrats profess to love jobs, they couldn’t stand employers. Now they’ve gone a step further: They don’t even favor work." ~ Carl M. Cannon, Washington Bureau Chief for RealClearPolitics
"The Economist Who Exposed ObamaCare"
And Professor Casey Mulligan did so, last August and even before, in February 2013!
"The Chicago professor examined the law's incentives for the poor not to get a job or work harder, and this week Beltway budgeteers agreed." ~ By Joseph Rago, Feb. 7, 2014Very professorily put. In everyday terms, it looks to Prof. Mulligan like the left-leaning who make that argument are taking full advantage of left-leaning people who don't know any better that they've just been put down on "the government plantation" (quoting African-American and Louisiana State Senator Elbert Guillory)--- by Obama himself."...the CBO—Congress's official fiscal scorekeeper, widely revered by Democrats and Republicans alike as the gold standard of economic analysis—reported that by 2024 the equivalent of 2.5 million Americans who were otherwise willing and able to work before ObamaCare will work less or not at all as a result of ObamaCare. As the CBO admits, that's a 'substantially larger' and 'considerably higher' subtraction to the labor force than the mere 800,000 the budget office estimated in 2010. The overall level of labor will fall by 1.5% to 2% over the decade, the CBO figures. Mr. Mulligan's empirical research puts the best estimate of the contraction at 3%. The CBO still has some of the economics wrong, he said in a phone interview Thursday, 'but, boy, it's a lot better to be off by a factor of two than a factor of six.'
"...Because the insurance subsidies are tied to income and phase out as cash wages rise, some people will have the incentive to remain poorer in order to continue capturing higher benefits. Another way of putting it is that taking away benefits has the same effect as a direct tax, so lower-income workers are discouraged from climbing the income ladder by working harder, logging extra hours, taking a promotion or investing in their future earnings through job training or education."...Instead, liberals have turned to claiming that ObamaCare's missing workers will be a gift to society. Since employers aren't cutting jobs per se through layoffs or hourly take-backs, people are merely choosing rationally to supply less labor. Thanks to ObamaCare, we're told, Americans can finally quit the salt mines and blacking factories and retire early, or spend more time with the children, or become artists.
"Mr. Mulligan reserves particular scorn for the economists making this 'eliminated from the drudgery of labor market' argument, which he views as a form of trahison des clercs. 'I don't know what their intentions are," he says, choosing his words carefully, "but it looks like they're trying to leverage the lack of economic education in their audience by making these sorts of points.'
Here's the chart accompanying the above-quoted article which shows the effects of ObamaCare to each of us paying taxes (since that is what the Supreme Court said ObamaCare was when it punted on this):
Firstly, the subtitle may be erroneous: looking at Prof. Mulligan's own paper which generated this chart and his blog, he refers to "Average Marginal Labor Income Tax Rates" under ObamaCare, while this chart's transcriber wrote "Average Statutory Marginal Income Tax Rates." Two different things, according to most sources I went to for definitions.
I'm no economics whiz and don't need to be, and neither do you, to see that yours and my average marginal income-tax rate right now is about 45%, and that because of Obama Care, it's jumping to 46% this year and to 47% the following year. TAXES GOING UP, especially when you can't afford them, is never a good thing.
[And for those who say "It's just as good as you think RomneyCare was in Massachusetts!", here's what Mulligan found: "The ACA will increase the national average marginal labor income tax rate about fourteen times more (sic) than the 2006 'Romneycare' health reform law increased the Massachusetts average rate."]
Mulligan continues in the WSJ article:
"...'are we saying we were working too much before? Is that the new argument? I mean make up your mind. We've been complaining for six years now that there's not enough work being done. . . . Even before the recession there was too little work in the economy. Now all of a sudden we wake up and say we're glad that people are working less? We're pursuing our dreams?'The larger betrayal, Mr. Mulligan argues, is that the same economists now praising the great shrinking workforce used to claim that ObamaCare would expand the labor market. He points to a 2011 letter organized by Harvard's David Cutler and the University of Chicago's Harold Pollack, signed by dozens of left-leaning economists including Nobel laureates, stating 'our strong conclusion' that ObamaCare will strengthen the economy and create 250,000 to 400,000 jobs annually."
And it's quiz time. Who said this?
“History shows that nations that uphold the rights of their people — including the freedom of religion — are ultimately more just and more peaceful and more successful.”
...while at the same time is "so dedicated to forcing people to act against their own conscience. By requiring through the contraceptive mandate that some religious-affiliated groups provide health plans covering what they consider abortifacient contraceptives..."?I'm sure that last part gave it away. Kathleen Parker of the Washington Post hits the surrealistic nail on the head asking,
"...isn’t the Obama administration effectively imposing its own religious rules? Thou shalt not protect unborn life.As the man says in this video at the 1:20 mark, peacefully standing in protest of Obama, standing up for his Constitutional rights, to the police officer threatening to arrest him just because he didn't like his anti-Obama sign, "This used to be America!" And the officer infringing on his Constitutional rights shoots back, "It ain't no more, OK?"...pry my jaw from the floorboards. Without a hint of irony, the president lamented eroding protections of religious liberty around the world.
Just not, apparently, in America.
[HT to Jim Vicevitch who has famously, repeatedly, played this soundbite on his program, and to Hot Air, for helping me find the vid.]
[Also the New York Times reports on that same "prayer breakfast" speech, saying that Obama praised Pope Francis and plans to meet with him next month when he visits the Vatican. Looking to capitalize on a selfie with the Pope, I'm sure, but I would love to be a fly on the Papal Walls to hear what Francis will call Obama out on the carpet about. He's just the man to do it.]
And speaking of free speech, oh, how Obama hates it when it's ours.
But he does more than just hate our free speech. Listen to the lengths his administration goes to to try to shut-up this woman, mother, business owner, and shut her down, financially.
(And they accuse us of waging a "War on Women"!)
She is just one of far too many.
From Powerlineblog, whose headline is "Barack Obama: The George Wallace of Free Speech:"
"Bitterly hostile to free speech when exercised by their political opponents, Democrats have done whatever they can to undermine Citizens United, just as they did decades ago with Brown vs. Board of Education. The I.R.S. scandal can best be seen in this light. The Democrats are using the levers of the executive branch, particularly the I.R.S., to deter Americans from exercising the First Amendment rights that were guaranteed them by the Supreme Court. For a full history of the Obama administration’s assault on civil rights, read this letter of February 4 from Darrell Issa and Jim Jordan of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform to John Koskinen, newly-appointed Commissioner of the I.R.S...So, just as Democrats of the 1950s and 60s tried to fix the problem of racial integration, the Obama administration tried to fix the problem of free speech."The Democrats even try to silence the free speech of other black Americans, like South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott:
I'd vote for Sen. Scott, or Louisiana State Senator Elbert Guillory in. a. heartbeat.
The Irony Of It All (Or At Least The Last Five Years)
It was Obama's policies (re: The Federal Reserve) that made the rich so very much richer, this past five years:
"What you have is a president who campaigns on income inequality and has absolutely no answer to what to do about it other than to raise the minimum wage, which is not going to have any effect on closing the gap, and then his own administration, over half a decade, has absolutely increased the disparity of wealth between the rich and the poor, and here he is campaigning against the results of his own presidency."
posted by Joy at 9:25 PM
