Do Corporations 'Believe'?Follow

Interestingly enough most statewide health care provider laws don't require coverage for in vitro fertilization or infertility treatments (a handful of states do).

Ahh, the hilarity.

Human nature is hilarious sometimes. In this case though, the data overwhelmingly supports the Conservative position. If we reduce the amount we "help" people, those same people will be better off as a result. I know that it's counter intuitive, but that is how things work. You let your kid live in your basement for as long as he wants, and he'll still be living in your basement at age 30, insisting all the while that he can't possibly get a job that could support him. Kick him out, and (yes: magically) he'll find a job and a place he can afford to live in within a couple weeks.

Happens all the time. Add in the fact that by simply not taxing so much money to provide those benefits, employers could actually employ more people in better paying jobs, and it's a double whammy.

A sufficiently advanced economic theory will appear as magic to the uneducated. I'm just using terminology that will match your feeble understanding of the issue.

Whatever helps you sleep at night. You're the one who refuses to believe that it works, despite massive data supporting it. Call it what you want, but the fact is that in most cases, "helping" someone doesn't really help them in the long run.

Neither does your lack of understanding sarcasm, apparently.

So, in Gbajiland corporations will magically create thousands and thousands of jobs if only welfare goes away. Apparently conservatives are childlike morons.

It actually wasn't, but it's English and we're all well aware of your weakness in that subject.

Wizards will make it all better!

Of course not, but still not sarcasm. Wanna swing again?

So you knew that I used the word "magic", but didn't actually mean that any magic was involved, but you also don't think it was sarcasm. Um... Ok. I'll take "mental disorder" for 1000 Alex. "What is Lolgaxe suffering from?"

Nearly 50 years of social spending with no appreciable difference in economic condition for those who receive them which can even remotely be attributed to the spending itself?

The only improvement in the lives of the poor over the last 50 years has been the result of technology improvements (almost all free market driven) which have made available better products and services at a low price. A person on welfare today is no better off than a person in the same economic percentile bracket not receiving welfare 50 years ago (again, speaking purely economically speaking). We had poor back then, but they were working poor. Which meant that over time, many of them would improve their lives. Today, we still have poor. But they are largely unworking poor. A working poor person tends to not be poor 10 years later. A non-working poor person being provided with the same subsistence living will still be poor 10 years later.


This is not some crazy thing. It's basic economics. The only thing subsistence benefits do is allow people to remain poor indefinitely. That's it. I know that this is hard for those who've been told that this is utterly necessary and if we don't do it, people will die, but that is the true. In the absence of such programs people do find ways to provide for themselves. It may be hard at first, and some of them will never be able to provide for themselves fully, but that's a tiny tiny fraction of the number of people receiving public assistance today. Those who truly can't survive without assistance can easily be handled with private charitable organizations. The mere creation of government programs handing out free lunches ensures a long line of people who will all insist that they need that free lunch or they will starve. Take the free lunch away, and it's amazing how no one actually starves.

And the flip side is the massive economic boom that I mentioned. This is harder to measure concretely, but assuming that wages are always a subset of productive labor value (cause no one's going to pay you more than you generate in profits for them), you take a few hundred billion dollars a year less in transfer payments and shift that into productive employment and the positive economic effect could be pretty huge. It's something that I really think most people just don't get. Money earned is "free" from a macro economic standpoint. Every dollar you earn is matched by an equal or greater amount of increase in total economic production. Labor doesn't cost anything because it pays for itself. Paying for people who aren't working is a double cost, not only because you lose the money you're spending on them but they're also not generating any positive economic production. So shifting money from one to the other has a large effect on the economy.

We just don't notice it because it's a slow and gradual thing. We didn't one day go from no social spending to spending 15% of our GDP on it. But that spending is not only bad for the targets of the spending, but also acting as a boat anchor on our economy. We can't know how much faster, bigger, better we'd all be off if we weren't doing that. It's like a guy who's been running laps while wearing a 50 pound backpack. You take it off, and you'll be amazed how much faster you can run.

Ah yes, the conservative talking point that those poor people are just lazy! If only they started looking for work, it would magically appear! The laws of supply and demand mean nothing at all! If those poor folks want jobs, they will appear!

Just how much cocaine do you have to snort to have your position make sense?