Why they hate working America: GOP equates benefits with personal failure

[DonViejo]

Republicans are tiptoeing closer to a critique of beneficiaries as lazy moochers. But the public won't stand for it

BRIAN BEUTLER

To hear conservatives bemoan Obamacare’s exorbitant benefits, you’d think the combination of a coverage guarantee and a subsidy that’s only redeemable to purchase health insurance are so bounteous as to destroy human ambition.

That’s obviously not true. Many conservatives know it’s not true. But it’s all they’ve wanted to talk about for a week now, ever since the Congressional Budget Office updated its analysis of the Affordable Care Act’s impact on the labor market. Maybe it’ll prove to be great politics. The GOP’s entire political strategy heading into midterm elections is rooted in the assumption that Obamacare will be the only issue that matters, and by definition a massive drag on Democrats

But there’s a danger here for the right, too. Their confidence in Obamacare’s political vulnerabilities is drawing the same ethos that helped doom Mitt Romney — the idea that any reliance on government benefits is tantamount to personal failure — out of dormancy. Except in some ways this is worse. They’re not condemning 47 percent of people in the country, but they are being much more specific about the class of people they’re condemning. And the implications of their criticisms are especially politically noxious at a time when politics is reorienting itself around the enormous problems of wage stagnation and inequality.

As a predicate to this discussion, keep in mind that the shared economic costs of the Affordable Care Act’s labor supply effects are very small, and the structure of the actual program doesn’t lend itself to promoting indolence, as its critics have implied. As I and others have written here and elsewhere, nobody can survive on subsidized health insurance alone, which means that most people who ultimately choose to leave the labor market as a result of Obamacare’s new benefits will have other sources of sustenance. Savings, perhaps, or a spouse with steady income.

more
http://www.salon.com/2014/02/11/why_they_hate_working_america_gop_equates_benefits_with_personal_failure/

[aquart]

1. They also equate trust funds with the sweet love of God.

[1StrongBlackMan]

6. Actually ...

they equate trust funds with something that they personally earned.

[aquart]

7. True.

[stillwaiting]

2. They are flat out brainwashed by the billionaires.

They identify with them more than their own family, friends, and neighbors.

They literally work to make the lives of their own family, friends, neighbors, and THEMSELVES less secure throughout their lives so that they can give more income/wealth to the elite.

It's embarrassing.

[Laelth]

5. +1. n/t

-Laelth

[bemildred]

3. It's all about control. It is always about control. nt

[Laelth]

4. k&r for the truth, however depressing it may be. n/t

-Laelth

[blkmusclmachine]

8. ,

,

[polynomial]

9. We all have a flash of inspiration...

…with this theme in mind very little thought about or talked about in the quality at the core of the American worker. America has a working population that is at the mercy of the employer via, health care, and what is tagged as the at will principle.

At large within the working class is what is called an “at will” business environment that is buffered out of the main topics in discussions by guess who? Yep, mainstream media news, and most of our politicians and legal people. And what the heck is the at will principle? That which an employer can at will eliminate or terminate someone from the job. And better believe it can be done as in get terminated for your open out spoken political believes.

One of the most interesting aspects is the realities of a Congress and Senate plus the political parties know to cut taxes means all types of support jobs are going to disappear.

The real wild part is the advertised notion that all this action has the flavor of being unintended consequences. War in particular presents an unstable job environment.

War material is so profiteered and focused to a very narrow working group were the system can tilt off balance for the goal of peace. That being the intrinsic quality of the extreme Islamic motive, looking through the peep hole of burka economics perpetual war is profitable, besides supporting it’s one percenters that are complicit with our one percent, it’s too big to fail.