<<< 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.
