I guess it’s beginning to sink in that the CBO report doesn’t say Obamacare’s going to kill 2 million jobs. It says that in the neighborhood of 2 million people may decide to leave the labor force voluntarily or cut back on hours at work because they won’t need the extra money to pay for health insurance anymore, a very different kettle of fish.
In effect, Obamacare isn’t going to eliminate jobs, it’s going to free some up for people looking for work.
You would think this news would please conservatives and austerity fetishists in the media who are worried that the long-term unemployed are having a cushy time of it, living it up on (at most, after taxes, depending on where they live) fourteen hundred dollars a month in unemployment compensation, and need to be forced to get up off the couch and go out and dignify themselves with a little hard labor. You’d think they might also like the idea that now some married mothers with small children (and some married fathers too) can stay home with the kids because their families can afford to buy insurance with one income. You’d think they’d be relieved on behalf of employers who now won’t have to worry about greedy employees demanding to work full-time in order to qualify for health insurance.
I’m not expecting them to care about all the people on the brink of old age but still too young for Medicare, wearing down from decades on the job, their bodies beginning to break down as bodies tend to do in their seventh decade, who can now afford to scale back and even retire. We’re talking about conservatives, after all. They believe it’s the responsibility of the not rich to work until we drop.
At any rate…
You’d think all that…if you didn’t know, as I’m sure you all do, at how flexible is conservatives’ thinking when they need to find reason for moral outrage.
The problem now is that all those people who don’t have to work to pay for health insurance will morally degenerate.
They’ll become a bunch of lazy bums.
I always get a kick out how well-off conservatives make a virtue out of demanding other people practice virtues conservatives don’t have to practice themselves.
I’d listen to Paul Ryan sermonizing on the dignity of work if he actually had to work for a living himself. Being a Congressman is something of a hobby for him. He has family money and he married money.
But I’m sure if he loses his next election, he’ll be back driving that Weinermobile in a heartbeat and doing it with dignity.
Of course, they tell themselves they are practicing those virtues. It’s not that their wealth and privilege and good fortune protecting them from the temptations and obstacles the poor and the struggling have to wrestle with daily. Their wealth and privilege and good fortune are their rewards for their virtue.
You get what you deserve in life even if it’s not clear what you did to deserve it but be born to the right parents in the right place and at the right time.
They work hard for their money, gosh darn it, and everybody else should work hard for theirs too!
What makes this sentiment less than noble is the way it equates work with productivity. It isn’t the work itself that gives workers dignity. It’s how much money the work makes for other, richer people.
Jobs---and by extension---the people who hold them only have worth to the degree they are productive. Which is basically another way of saying that the purpose of life is to make money.
This odious and degrading philosophy seems to be held mainly by people who overestimate their own productivity.
“I work hard, I get paid well, therefore I must be productive,” they boast to themselves, also thinking the reverse is true. “I am productive, I get paid well, so that must mean I work hard.”
Reasonable, I suppose, except that in fact they don’t work hard. They just work a lot. And by working a lot I mean they spend a lot of time at work.
But spending time a lot of time at work, thinking about work, and worrying about work isn’t the same as working, and it might be a generally good thing if we all stopped pretending it is, as the great Wev McEwan, observes:
…we need to be honest about the fact that, while there are many jobs at which people are overworked as a result of profit-prioritizing chronic understaffing, there are also lots of jobs at which people are obliged to spend at least 40 hours a week, even though the job itself doesn't require 40 hours of work. Or: May require 60 hours one week, and only 20 the next.
It really would not be the worst thing in the world if people were allowed to work the number of hours they need to work to fulfill their job requirements.
I mean, not that we all don't love the incredibly stupid game of Staring Intently at Minesweeper on a Monitor Like We're Seriously Working on a Difficult Problem (or whatever variation one's job may require), but we have some truly asinine conceptions about productivity that make hand-wringing about people working fewer hours pretty pointless. For a lot of people, "working fewer hours" might realistically translate into "spending fewer hours being visible at the office," not actually being less productive.
Read all of Liss’ post, Legions of Lazy Strawpeople.
Also, Michael Hiltzik on Why the new CBO report on Obamacare is good news at the LA Times.
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