Free Market Family Values

[paft.livejournal.com]

Stuart Varney: Why don’t you just spend more time with the family, let somebody else work, you go on Obamacare… Stay home, spend more time with the family, let somebody else pay for your healthcare…


It began as the usual Obamacare Horror Story “Bombshell” going pfffffft. We’ve seen it happen, over and over again. A supposedly dire effect of the Affordable Care Act gets cited, which, on examination, turns out to involve someone who could easily afford it paying a higher premium or (in the case of “Bette,” cited during a Republican response to the SOTU) someone who’s been “victimized” by her own refusal to use the options offered by the ACA.

The latest involves the release of the Congressional Budget Office’s report on the impact of the ACA. “Law will reduce fulltime employment by about 2 million,” it was announced. “Healthcare Law will reduce hours worked by about 1.5% to 2% from 2017-2024”

“You wonder how they explain it,” exclaimed a Fox Anchor.

Wouldn’t you know it, CBO director Doug Elmendorf went and spoiled everything by explaining it. See, it’s not so much a matter of jobs being eliminated. It’s a matter of many workers now having the option of reducing their hours or, if they have enough savings, retiring completely from the workforce. As the report says (emphasis added),

The estimated reduction stems almost entirely from a net decline in the amount of labor that workers choose to supply, rather than from a net drop in businesses' demand for labor…


So what’s the next step on the right? Act outraged that many workers will actually be in a position to, not just leave jobs they dislike for jobs they prefer, but also cut back on their work hours so they can spend more time with their (get this) families.



Or worse yet, if they’ve got enough in savings, retire!

Jon Stewart puts it beautifully in his reaction in Varney’s comments, “What the Hell? You’re conservatives. I thought you guys loved the family.”…’The family must be protected from asteroids, nuclear weapons, dudes in love, they have to be protected!’”

Some of you may remember last autumn a thread on retail workers being made to work on Thanksgiving (or, as one sniveling coward of a retailer put it in its ads, “Thursday.”) Stewart remembers the issue too.

“Now that I think about it,” he observes, “When family clashes with capitalism around the holidays, conservatives throw family overboard.”

Yes, yes, I remember the arguments I encountered here. Giving an employee paid time off on that day is a dire restriction of their freedom. Demanding they come in to work on a major holiday isn’t going to seriously crimp any plans. Nobody books air tickets months in advance and endures long security lines and packed planes for the sake of traveling to see the folks on that day. And requiring someone to man the toy department on Thanksgiving Day is just the same as asking emergency and health workers, airline and telecom employees and other vital transportation and communication personnel to work on that day.

Which left me with the spooky sense the Internet is not just a revolutionary means of communication that spans the globe. It may very well enable us to interact with the inhabitants of some parallel universe where airports are all but empty in late November through December and retail workers are clamoring for the chance to work on what, (in this universe,) is a wildly popular, family oriented holiday.

I kid, of course. The people making these bizarre arguments are, in fact, inhabitants of our world, who, for the sake of defending the indefensible, are willing to feign a complete disconnection from reality. But the more I listen to free market conservatives, the more it sounds as though they believe only upper management should reproduce. In the minds of these folks, people making below a certain amount have no business bearing children or keeping in touch with aging relatives or siblings.

Apparently, a JOB is not a way for people to support themselves and their dependents while contributing to either the private or public sector. If it pays so little and takes up so much time that there is nothing left for friends and family, workers shouldn’t complain. They should just be glad they have a JOB.

A JOB after all, is a quasi-religious requirement, which establishes a firm caste system (see the arguments about whether someone who digs ditches 40 hours a week “deserves” a living wage) and trumps any other personal tie or obligation.

*

Comments

[fizzyland.livejournal.com]

it's the adverse result it creates

Evidence for this or we just supposed to take this claim on faith?

[telemann.livejournal.com]

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

No, on the rationale that follows.

[fizzyland.livejournal.com]

So, Jeff-opinion?

Will that happen before or after Switzerland's economy tanks because of a guaranteed minimum income?

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

I'd worry about that when we have some indication as to whether that would pass.

[kylinrouge.livejournal.com]

Many of these European countries already have generous welfare systems and they haven't collapsed.

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

Yet. France is in pretty dire straits right now, as an example. It's not like it happens immediately.

[kylinrouge.livejournal.com]

"While France undoubtedly has problems, it is not clear that they are more severe than those facing other countries, like the United States. For example, while its overall employment to population ratio is somewhat lower than in the United States, this is entirely due to the fact that younger people and older people are less likely to work in France than in the United States. Its employment rate for prime age workers is actually 5 percentage points higher than in the United States."

- http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/the-nyt-doesnt-like-the-french-welfare-state

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

Good to know the liberal think tanks are there to Baghdad Bob the scenario for us.

(frozen) (no subject)

[luvdovz.livejournal.com]

It's much easier to assume a correlation that matches your preferred narrative, and preach it as if it were the ultimate truth, all other arguments be damned. Amirite?

(frozen) (no subject)

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

Not preferred, no, just what's actually going on.

(frozen) (no subject)

[luvdovz.livejournal.com]

No, it's your preferred narrative. Do not presume your preferred reality to be the actual reality.

(frozen) (no subject)

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

Take it up with the New York Times, then. I didn't ask them to report what's happening in this case, they simply chose to do so.

(frozen) (no subject)

[luvdovz.livejournal.com]

It's nice to see that you now trust NYT as a source - of course, it happens so that they match your narrative in this case, so this must explain it.

(frozen) (no subject)

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

You say "now" as if I didn't before. Strange, that.

[kylinrouge.livejournal.com]

I provided something, other than Jeff's Word Is Law.

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

The NYT article that actually tells the story is linked in yours, so I'd be hopeful people would go straight to the source.

(frozen) (no subject)

[kylinrouge.livejournal.com]

This is the 3rd straight comment where I ask for you to back up the shit you say, and you won't. Got anything other than the NYT article that was just critisized in my source?

This is exactly what people mean when they say you hand-wave stuff away. I give you a link with a citation and you say 'nope'. That's all you give.

You're completely intellectually dishonest and you're only here to troll. I'm done here. cya

(frozen) (no subject)

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

This is the 3rd straight comment where I ask for you to back up the shit you say, and you won't. Got anything other than the NYT article that was just critisized in my source?

Nope, that does the trick just fine.

This is exactly what people mean when they say you hand-wave stuff away. I give you a link with a citation and you say 'nope'. That's all you give.

Keep crying about it, then. I have an esteemed journalistic enterprise, you have a think tank. Kudos to you for actually offering something of value for the first time in months, but you don't have a lot of room to argue about quality.

You're completely intellectually dishonest and you're only here to troll. I'm done here. cya

And if you have to resort to insults, it clearly shows how weak your argument truly is.

(frozen) (no subject)

[luvdovz.livejournal.com]

Kudos to you for actually offering something of value for the first time in months

You're a troll. And you don't even try to pretend that you're not. It's sad that you're allowed to run this place, as if your position shields you from the disingenuous shit that you frequently spit out.

(frozen) (no subject)

[htpcl.livejournal.com]

> Kudos to you for actually offering something of value for the first time in months

You too. Do not do this again, OK? I'm sure you can make a point without resorting to these personal qualifications.

(frozen) (no subject)

[htpcl.livejournal.com]

The word troll has been floating around way too often. I suggest everyone refrain from using it. If you believe your arguments are not being met with the standard that you expect, I'm sure you're completely able to step away from the conversation before it has devolved into an endless flame-war.

/thread

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

So why has Germany been an economic juggernaut with social welfare states the whole time through given that it was the first European state to implement them? The 1920s and 1930s don't count because WWI created an atypical era where elements of Germany's economy were affected by extra-German events.

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

So why has Germany been an economic juggernaut with social welfare states the whole time through given that it was the first European state to implement them?

I'd imagine at least part of it might be cultural, but their labor costs also appear to be less on first glance. I don't know much about Germany in this area on a whole, but any expansion of their social welfare state is only going to hasten the inevitable.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

"I don't know much about Germany as a whole" would be more accurate, given that the trend for Germany's welfare state was on the upward trend universally from Caprivi to Reunification in the Weimar, Nazi, and West German systems and nowhere did it imperil German prosperity. What handicapped Weimar and the Nazis both was the obsession with military might, which provided an unnatural distorting effect. Postwar Germany and the German Empire both managed steady economic growth that outmatched everything else in Europe at the time.

This is rather basic stuff to people who know German history. So, in short, since Germany did undergo repeated political collapses but its economy and the welfare state never had anything to do with it (starting and losing big wars, on the other hand.....), well........your statements are weighed on the balance scale and found wanting.