I found this hilarious post by someone named Flopper on a message board:
No Government Spending Needed to Create Jobs but There is a Cost
There are two pieces of legislation needed to accomplish full employment in America, both supported by many conservatives.
1. Repeal the minimum wage law.
2. Remove financial support for those out of work including unemployment, welfare, food stamps, etc…Removing the minimum wage allows employers to pick up good employees at very low labor rates. Once all financial support is removed, the unemployed will seek any kind of work offered. It’s either that or starve. Unemployment rates would drop rapidly. This will also solve the problem of jobs being sent abroad. With the lower labor rates, employers will have little reason to go abroad for cheap labor. The only real negative financial aspect is that working Americans will not have the income to purchase much more than necessities. This can be overcome by exporting more of the new cheap American made goods. Bleeding heart liberals will complain that America is becoming a third world country but you have to make a few sacrifices if you want to compete in today’s world markets. The above may sound a bit ridiculous but there are a lots of people that think this way.
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Hmmm… they would have a point, possibly, except that history doesn’t provide any evidence this is the case. Federal minimum wage laws, unemployment insurance, and Aid to Dependent Children (ADC -> AFDC -> TANF, AKA welfare) were all a passed years into the Great Depression, thus could not be the cause for prolonged economic decline. I suppose these conservatives might argue the beggar-thy-neighbor trade policies of the 1930s inhibited an essentially safety-net free recovery; however, in a world-wide economic crisis — then, like now, it is hard to see how adding even more to the billions who have the choice of starving or work for next to nothing is going to make things better — those countries totally lacking a safety net are not recovering better or faster than we are because they were in terrible shape to begin with.
Oh, and malnourished and uneducated children make such good labor when they grow up.
There are many countries with these exact policies. If they think it works so well why don’t they go there.
“We have stopped thinking in terms of a minimum wage. That belongs to yesterday, before we quite knew what paying high wages meant. Now so few people get the minimum wage that we do not bother about it at all. We try to pay a man what he is worth and we are not inclined to keep a man who is not worth more than the minimum wage.”
Henry Ford, 1926
This is one of many reasons why the Republicans scare me.
Sadly, this is the way many of the right-wing followers think (thanks in large part due to the corporate talking heads machine such as Fox News).
The middle class will be eliminated with thoughts like these…and will be cheered on by the mindless masses who won’t realize the truth until everything is gone…
I believe we as a nation have a responsibility to halp our fellow citizens during times of difficulty. These programs and the help they render were never intended to be permanent solutions for people, but temporary assistance till they got back on their feet. What we need to do is define the length of temporary. Is it 6 months, 1 year, 2 years or 10 years.
This recession will likely go on for another 3-5 years. The jobs that were lost will not return. We must create new jobs and that will not happen until (like it or not) we offer incentives to private business to open their wallets, invest in America again and create jobs. I know everyone hates the wealthy fatcats and big business, but they are who must pull us out of this economic situation not the government. Every job added to goverment roles increases our tax burden or debt as is the case now. Adding layers of new regulation, restrictions, taxes (healthcare)does not incentivize them, they are more likely to look at foreign markets to invest and create jobs.
The real mystery is, why do the wingnuts always assume that they will not be among the new desperate-serf class?
Mr Haggard — The timing of the Henry Ford quote is very odd. 1929 was not only just as US workers’ wages began a precipitous decline (supply and demand — people were desperate during the Depression because this is the very model that obtained then), but he was also a good decade in advance of the minimum wage. One wonders what he was talking about…
And in the background, somewhere in America, I take a moment from my endless job hunt, from the reams of resumes sent out unanswered, my retinas burning from hours perusing job boards and LinkedIn requests for recommendations that mean nothing, and I sit and knit and rock as FOX news blinks at low volume in the background, and I knit as I feel a deep, furious burning rising in my gorge because there is no work, no Christmas this year; maybe I can pay either the rent or the heat bill now that the crumbs of unemployment have been tossed to me; and I knit and watch McConnell’s chinless indignation about how tax cuts would disturb his billionaire buddies during this terrible recession … and I knit, and I knit, and I think, and I think …
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