Where does decline come from?
Denying reality (emphasis added):
At the same time, government-provided benefits — from Social Security, unemployment insurance, food stamps and other programs — rose to a record high during the first three months of 2010.
Those records reflect a long-term trend accelerated by the recession and the federal stimulus program to counteract the downturn. The result is a major shift in the source of personal income from private wages to government programs.
The trend is not sustainable, says University of Michigan economist Donald Grimes. Reason: The federal government depends on private wages to generate income taxes to pay for its ever-more-expensive programs. Government-generated income is taxed at lower rates or not at all, he says. "This is really important," Grimes says.
In other words, you can of course eat your own capacity to survive – until the food runs out.
Look at this stunning sentence from that USA Today article:
Economist David Henderson of the conservative Hoover Institution says a shift from private wages to government benefits saps the economy of dynamism. "People are paid for being rather than for producing," he says.
That’s the heart of it. The core of Obamaism, so-called compassionate conservatism and the basis for EU ‘solidarity’.
The idea that ‘production’ can be taken for granted in policy making, and that all that counts is redistribution.
Which is fine, until countries which put their main effort into production rather than ‘being’ catch up then crush us. If we have not collpased under the wieght of our stupidity first.
Meanwhile here in the UK we have Laura Hall, a young woman banned from being in public places selling alcohol as she is prone to ‘binge drinking’ and getting disorderly.
Driving about my business yesterday I heard this tragic, absurd Laura Hall being interviewed on BBC Radio 5 Live.
The interviewer of course was determined not be ‘judgmental’, but it did not matter. This walking human wreck with her vacant slurry voice and incoherent thinking condemned herself well enough.
It turned out that she was getting something called a Job Seeker’s Allowance of some £60 per week. Which she seemed to be spending on a typical girls’ night in, with a bottle of wine then a litre of vodka then beers.
She is being paid by those of us who produce, simply to be.
In her case, to be nothing.
I waited in vain for the presenter to ask the right questions. Did not this girl feel bad about mooching off honest people indefinitely?
And why should those honest people one day not simply … shrug – decide once and for all to drop that burden, and refuse to pay?
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