Saturday, July 28, 2012

Do Public Jobs Help Create Private Jobs?

A government employee identified as "Matt" told Rush Limbaugh's audience that he thought public sector jobs help create private sector jobs. His example: a government program used tax money to pay him to baby-sit a disabled man so the parents of the disabled man could work fourteen and sixteen-hour days in their private business.

You can watch what Rush Limbaugh said to him here:

http://dailyrushbo.com/was-rush-too-mean-to-public-employee-caller/

Or read it here:

http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2012/07/26/impassioned_response_to_public_employee

I think most U.S. readers know how Rush Limbaugh sounds. Foreign readers, I highly recommend listening to this transcript, because the difference between Limbaugh's way of speaking English and, say, Peter Jennings' way of speaking English is subtle but very powerful. It's the intonation Limbaugh puts into his sentences, as much as the rhetorical repetition he uses, that causes much of the emotional reaction American audiences have--whether they love him, hate him, or dismiss him as "someone who's talking to long-distance truck drivers, so he has to yell at them like that just to keep them awake." If your English sounds more like Limbaugh's than like Jennings', then whatever you say will be perceived as more "impassioned," more aggressive, more working-class, more representative of some Americans and less acceptable to other Americans, than the same ideas as they might be uttered by Jennings. And when you challenge someone's assumptions, you're likely to be heard as sounding "too mean."

U.S. readers, I know the Limbaugh Show is daytime talk radio/video; I'm familiar with it only from times when I've been working with disabled patients who appreciate the limited intellectual stimulation daytime talk radio provides. Not a situation into which some of us may want to get, but one we're likely to reach, like it or not. Anyway there are episodes for which I think it is worth the trouble to detach your emotional reactions to his "tone" and read the transcript of what Limbaugh is saying. This is one of them, and, for the record, I think he's right.

It's not that Matt the Public-Sector Employee may not be a fine human being who intended to help his disabled patient, and did help him, and did thereby help his parents.

It's that, on balance, we the people of these United States can't afford much more help from people like Matt anyway. They're costing us more than they're making for us, as a nation.

All those New Deal and Great Society schemes that provided "free" tax-funded goodies to those willing to beg for them, during the twentieth century, were based on the premise that our national economy was growing. Well, throughout most of my lifetime, apart from brief upticks during the Reagan and Clinton administration, it's stopped growing; it's been shrinking. And there's no realistic basis for assuming that, even if young people have more babies who will supposedly pay into the socialized "care" systems, those babies will grow up to earn enough money to keep those systems afloat.

Proof that the welfare state isn't working includes the abomination known as Obamacare. We've known for years that, in order to continue providing "free"/subsidized care to an increasing number of disabled Americans, employable Americans were going to have to pay higher taxes. We didn't like to think about it, but we knew. But, despite President Obama's stated objections to the loathsome idea, our Congress wasn't able to work out a sustainable way to increase the subsidized medical care funding, to anything like the extent the experts think we need, without relying on the billion-dollar gamble known as the insurance industry. We weren't offered the straight tax that many Americans, e.g. the writer of this blog post, were willing to grit our teeth and try to pay. Congress assumed that too many Americans, e.g. the writer of this blog post, just didn't have enough incomes to pay that much in straight taxes. Instead, Congress assumed, we would have to be forced to subsidize the insurance gambling scheme so that more money could be gouged out of the millionnaires.

Congress aren't that stupid, Gentle Readers. Okay, maybe some of them took bribes from the insurance industry. Others, like mine, argued and voted against Obamacare (and then, in the case of Congressman Boucher, lost their positions anyway because the majority party claimed they hadn't argued loudly enough). But the fact that a critical mass of our Senators and Representatives did enact Obamacare shows that they accept the statistical argument that our economic situation is desperate. You don't rely on gambles to fund things that can be funded by anything but gambles.

Matt presents himself as a good man, and I feel for him, but the fact is that, like a lot of good people in the private sector, he's due for downsizing anyway. We like him; we just can't afford him. The Waste Age is over. Like it or not, Matt may have to go back to working in a factory, or farming a small patch of steep, thin, rocky Pennsylvania soil, to pay his bills. And he may have to simplify his lifestyle in order to pay those bills, whatever he does.

Sorry, Matt, but it looks as if my parents and grandparents were right...and because they were right, at least I can tell you that the poverty-in-America that lies ahead of you doesn't have to be as horrible as you think.

No comments:

Post a Comment