2016 Postmortem
Related: About this forumWhy they hate working America: GOP equates benefits with personal failure
Republicans are tiptoeing closer to a critique of beneficiaries as lazy moochers. But the public won't stand for itBRIAN BEUTLER
To hear conservatives bemoan Obamacares exorbitant benefits, youd think the combination of a coverage guarantee and a subsidy thats only redeemable to purchase health insurance are so bounteous as to destroy human ambition.
Thats obviously not true. Many conservatives know its not true. But its all theyve wanted to talk about for a week now, ever since the Congressional Budget Office updated its analysis of the Affordable Care Acts impact on the labor market. Maybe itll prove to be great politics. The GOPs 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 theres a danger here for the right, too. Their confidence in Obamacares 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. Theyre not condemning 47 percent of people in the country, but they are being much more specific about the class of people theyre 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 Acts labor supply effects are very small, and the structure of the actual program doesnt 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 Obamacares 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
(69,014 posts)1StrongBlackMan
(31,849 posts)they equate trust funds with something that they personally earned.
aquart
(69,014 posts)stillwaiting
(3,795 posts)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
(32,017 posts)-Laelth
bemildred
(90,061 posts)Laelth
(32,017 posts)-Laelth
blkmusclmachine
(16,149 posts)polynomial
(750 posts)
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 its one percenters that are complicit with our one percent, its too big to fail.