Look, let's be clear: you are lazy if you can work but prefer taking money from me so you can pursue your dream of being a stoner or an artist or a dancer.

<<< This chart comes from the recent CBO report and shows a shocking decline in the labor force well past 2025.  Those who are leaving the labor force to "pursue their dreams" while living off the rest of us,  those jobs will not be filled 

This week, America’s political class has been consumed by an intense, vitriolic debate over a single number: 2.5 million.

That’s the amount by which, according to the Congressional Budget Office, President Obama’s signature health care law will effectively reduce the U.S. work force over the next decade.

The initial Republican reaction was predictable: Pundits filled the airwaves, Cassandra-like, to paint Obamacare as the ultimate job killer. Never mind that, reading the fine print, it’s clear the CBO was talking about workers voluntarily reducing their hours in response to the law—not getting laid off or seeing their shifts scaled back.

Editor's notes:  Apparently "getting laid off or seeing . . . . shifts scaled back  (that is happening,  you know) is a curse while quitting your job because others are subsidizing your health insurance is a good thing.  

And anyway, isn’t that supposed to be a good thing?  Editor: it isn't a good thing if I choose to work to get ahead AND have to subsidizer your laziness, and, again,  you ARE lazy if you are my neighbor,  and taking my hard earned money so you stay home to be a parent to children who are not home but attending school.  

. . . . . .  Then real progress would begin. Humane and moral progress. Instead of perpetual consumerism and the infinite increase in material wealth, we would naturally turn to improving the human condition, learning how to live together “wisely, agreeable, and well,” as Keynes put it. Progress would then take the form of healthier families, communities and cities—the increase of knowledge, the enjoyment of nature, history and other peoples, an increasing delight in the marvels of the human spirit, the practice of our beliefs and values together, the finding of common ground for conviviality, expanding our awareness of God, wondering in Creation.  Editor: lets not forget to add poorer hard working neighbors,  a life living on the dole and passing that tradition on to your children, forgetting about the need to further your schooling since you no longer need to work,  and living a life where "perpetual consumerism" is replaced by perpetual welfare.  Never mind upward mobility - you have sold that off for a stay at home,  stay where you,  life of loafing around the block in order to maintain your health,  now that you have the time do so because you are taking money out of my pocket.  

  

Most Americans approved, counting work reductions as the better half of industrial progress (higher wages and shorter hours). Editor:  actually,  most Americans did not approve,  preferring to work versus living off others' sacrifice and ingenuity.  

No one expected this progress would end. Quite the contrary. Through the last century, observers such as John Maynard Keynes, Julien Huxley, Dorothy Canfield Fisher and Eric Sevareid regularly predicted that soon America would enter an age of leisure in which we would chose to devote more and more of our lives to the “pursuit of happiness” promised in the Declaration of Independence. As technology created “labor-saving” machines and the economy grew, they reasoned, we would gradually be able to buy back more of our time from our jobs, preferring leisure to new goods and services that we had never needed, or even seen before.  Editor:  the professor never gets around to telling the reader that all of this Utopian balther is not possible without a taxation rate (eventually) of 90% for ALL Americans  --  just as soon as the word is out that the industrious among us can earn enough to support all of us.  

These lofty sentiments mixed with the ordinary delights: slow meals together (Ralph Waldo Emerson), conversations in the evening (Henry David Thoreau), dancing the night away (William Ellery Channing), singing in the choir (Jonathan Edwards), “observing a spear of summer grass” (Walt Whitman), reading and talking about books (Robert Hutchins), playing amateur sports (Fannia Cohn) and walking around Central Park in the dead of winter (Elizabeth Hasanovitz). Even Abraham Lincoln believed that the steam plow and other agricultural technologies would free farm workers from steady toil for more opportunities to learn, socialize, govern themselves and pursue happiness.

<<< This chart comes from the recent CBO report and shows a shocking decline in the labor force well past 2025.  Those who are leaving the labor force to "pursue their dreams" while living off the rest of us,  those jobs will not be filled.  If intended as a true projection, the chart shows 10 million folks leaving the workforce by 2025.

Editor’s notes:  It is not a good thing when the very report we are talking about,  the  "CBO"  report framing the 10 year forecast for this nation,  makes the case in the most negative of terms.  Indeed,  folks are no longer incentivized to work.  The argument,  by Libs,  that these abandoned jobs will be filled by those who want to work,  is not supported by the CBO’s report and a simple look at the charts accompanying the report,  proves my point,  especially the chart showing employment projects for the future.

Benjamin Kline Hunnicut is professor of leisure studies at the University of Iowa and author of  The Forgotten American Dream.

Read the full article,  an Utopian fanciful explanation for the job creating failures of the Obama Administration:    http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/02/jobs-leisure-republicans-want-us-to-work-all-the-time-103282.html#ixzz2srkK8CS0