Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
If you voluntarily reduce your income to avoid paying full price for child support, you are a deadbeat Dad. We want people to work so they can afford things like medical care for their kids.
If you hide your income to avoid paying full state income taxes, you are a tax cheat. We want people to work, on-book, and pay their fair share.
If you give away your income to qualify for nursing home care, you are disqualified from receiving it. We want people to pay for their own medical care, if they can.
If you cut your hours, reduce your income, move it off-book, and make yourself poor on paper . . . you get Obama-care subsidies.
We don’t want people to work? Who’s going to pay for all the free unicorns and rainbows?
Joe Doakes
The Obama administration’s whole “reducing the need to work” schtick reminds me of a joke from the nineties; “Q: How many Microsoft developers does it take to change a light bulb? A: None; Bill Gates will declare Darkness ™ the new standard”.
Mitch, look for Keith Ellison’s quote from late last week. He said how great it is that people will be working less now.
The gulf between Tea Party conservatives and lazy liberals is wider than ever.
Their health care costs haven’t been lowered. The costs are being paid by somebody else. They quit working because somebody else is paying a growing share of their expenses. How is that not living off of the government?
A great move to achieve “income equality.” A while back I speculated that the then-new 30 hour work week was a means to lower the overall income of American society, thereby eliminating much of the evils that the lost money used to buy; single-family homes, property (land), automobiles, oil, and other things deemed conspicuous consumption. The supposed pro’s of this would be more free time, a boost mass transit, a market-based overall lowering of costs, less consumption of fossil fuels and climate change, etc. Affordable health care, too.
The latest employment reduction promotion seems to be all that and more. Each parent, assuming the nuclear family survives, holds about one half of a job. No one is assigned the chore of primary caregiver because families punished with a baby (or two) will not be able to survive on just one job. Besides, government supported pre-K “schooling” and all-day kindergarten will not leave much time to waste on parent/child interaction anyway. Taking all this into account, why even bother to get married (unless you are a homosexual)? Is that income equality, or what?
I’m still waiting to see how the new normal will address Kennedy/ Dayton-like trust funds and other types of previously acquired unfair wealth. Who knows? If all this comes to pass, I may be sharing a sidewalk with my new neighbor, Mark Dayton.