It is an economic truth that what you subsidize you get more of and what you tax you get less of. So if you were to punish work and reward slothfulness you would get less of the former and more of the latter. A government can buy as many poor people as it is willing to pay for. If the pay is good, people will seek non-work in large numbers.
In our country, the non-work pay can be quite good as the following stories demonstrate. First, a clip from the Tyler Durden column, When Work is Punished:
Exactly two years ago, some of the more politically biased progressive media outlets took offense at our article “In Entitlement America, The Head Of A Household Of Four Making Minimum Wage Has More Disposable Income Than A Family Making $60,000 A Year.” In it we merely explained what has become the painful reality in America: for increasingly more it is now more lucrative – in the form of actual disposable income – to sit, do nothing, and collect various welfare entitlements, than to work. This is graphically, and very painfully confirmed, in the below chart from Gary Alexander, Secretary of Public Welfare, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (a state best known for its broke capital Harrisburg). As quantified, and explained by Alexander, “the single mom is better off earning gross income of $29,000 with $57,327 in net income & benefits than to earn gross income of $69,000 with net income and benefits of $57,045.“
Do follow the link to Durdens column. It is a good elaboration on the trend that will devour us.
Another trend demonstrates how enticing an entitlement hammock can be. Ask yourself if there is there something about a recession that would cause widespread disability? I don’t think so either. Let’s ask the question a different way. Is there something about being paid for doing nothing that would be enticing to people?
Disability claims are skyrocketing. The government now spends more on disability than food stamps and welfare combined. Since the recession supposedly ended in 2009, around 150,000 jobs have been created each month. But an average of 250,000 people have applied for disability each month. It’s good non-work, if you can get it. And it is increasingly easy to get. In one Alabama county, 1 out of 4 working-age adults is lying in this golden hammock. USA Today reports that it is common for people to accept unemployment ’compensation’ until it runs out and then become disabled.
Just like poverty, a society can buy as much disability as it wants to pay for. The economic law that you get more of what you subsidize is true everywhere. So in Britain, where disability benefits were easily available, millions signed up. Like all utopian welfare states, Britain itself is becoming disabled with debt, so a decision was made to review each disability claim to check for fraud. Jonah Goldberg reports:
[Britain] asked everyone receiving an “incapacity benefit” to submit to a medical test to confirm they were too disabled to work. A third of recipients (878,000 people) didn’t even bother and dropped out of the program rather than be examined. Of those tested, more than half (55 percent) were found fit for work, and a quarter were found fit for some work.
So that’s around one-fourth who legitimately need help and around 75% who were scammers to differing degrees. Beyond the economic cost, it is not a good sign for the future of a country when this many adults are comfortable living as parasites.
Daniel Greenfield reports that if those on disability formed a state, the State of Disability would be the 11th largest state. One of the currently favored maladies in this state is “mood disorders”.
On a related subject, do not be fooled by the reported employment statistics. As bad as they are, reality is much worse. One key to understanding the truth is to know that 663,000 people dropped out of the labor force in March. There are now 90 million working age Americans who are not even looking for work. The deception in the reported statistics is that these people are not counted as unemployed. So, if everyone dropped out of the workforce, the unemployment rate would be zero…. and the media would report it as a vindication of Obamas brilliant policies.
Daniel Amerman has a detailed explanation of the employment deception here. An excerpt:
…a detailed look at the government’s own data base shows that about 9 million people without jobs have been removed from the labor force simply by the government defining them as not being in the labor force anymore. Indeed – effectively all of the decreases in unemployment rate percentages since 2009 have come not from new jobs, but through reducing the workforce participation rate so that millions of jobless people are removed from the labor force by definition.
