In the process of attempting to push through the greatest expansion in social spending maybe ever, Joe Biden has enlisted an eager Bernie Sanders to unite the progressive caucus behind Biden’s bi-partisan infrastructure bill and social legislation of much greater scale, that will address financial inequality and attack monumental environmental challenges.
Biden is asking Sanders to help with a bill that they envision quite differently. Biden’s bill will cost 4.5 trillion but Sanders sees it gong as high as 6 trillion. The first problem in making their separate views work is the courting of Democratic moderates like Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema .
All that spending will be focused on areas that Bernie has been championing for decades, stuff like climate change, childcare, free education, job training and healthcare. Bernie being Bernie envisions the money for this coming from large corporations and rich taxpayers who will be forced to pay their fair share, something they will fight to the death.
Those of you who are followers of the Curmudgeon know where I stand on all this. The basic question will always be how much is enough? Does anyone need a billion dollars, especially when there are those among us who legitimately cannot fed their children? Let’s not kid ourselves, the search for a rich man who got that way completely on his own with no help from family or friendly elements in society and who has managed to stay that way without more of the same would be a long hard one. The richest of the rich, corporate or private, maintain their positions by pressure on those who cannot afford to fight them. That is precisely why they owe a, so far, unpaid debt to those they are stepping on as they pursue their mad scramble to greater riches.
This is a situation that many have sought to solve but there are side effects to our small victories that threaten to undermine any good we have done in helping those less fortunate.
Right now, even as we are backing social legislation that will go a long way to making a huge segment of the population’s lives better we are facing seriously negative results of altruistic legislation that we have already passed to support economic failures during the COVID Pandemic.
Let me start by declaring that “subsidy” is a dirty word. Subsidies, no matter for what purpose, are destructive to the economic and political structure of a nation. This is true, regardless of whether they are given to major corporations, small contractors or individuals. They always look like they are necessary for the survival of the grantee but they always end up damaging the body politic.
The perfect example on one end of the spectrum is the billions in subsidies that our government has given to the fossil fuel industry. It was an essential industry and there may have been a time when it legitimately needed help to stay afloat. But that time is long gone and that greedy industry has stolen billions, that should have been used for more essential purposes, from the American taxpayer, even when it was making billions in profit and costing billions in pollution.
Now, at the other end of the spectrum we find individual workers who are making so much money on various aspects of the dole that they see no reason to work for anything like a reasonable wage or in fact to work at all. This is going on in some parts of the country when in others; workers are still fighting for a living wage.
In the last week or so I have spoken to small business owners from a number of different states and they have all had the same complaint. They can no longer find unskilled labor at almost any price. A contractor from Florida tells me that he had unskilled labor refuse to work for $50 an hour because they were afraid it would interfere with their recently enacted government income. I heard a similar complaint from a guy who sets up tents for weddings and other events in Pennsylvania and a contractor in Queens, NY.
It seems that the idea of giving people extra money on top of their unemployment benefits to help them through the pandemic was a good idea at the time but it is now backfiring because the program lacked controls when it was implemented and the result is that workers are staying home by the hundreds of thousands and work isn’t getting done.
You can babble on about the dignity of labor but the reality is no one wants to do grunt labor unless they have to. There are very few jobs that are actually fulfilling and the only way to fill the rest of them is to pay a wage that allows the worker to pay his bills. That is the basis of capitalism. But if the government is paying his bills he would be an idiot to do boring, stultifying work that must be done in order for society to function.
So we are faced with a problem that we have created out of the goodness of our hearts and a sense of justice. Everyone has a right to a certain level of life even though he or she has to work for it, but that’s the key; you have to work for it. In the attempt to fulfill that dictum we have released a dragon that is running amok and is eating its own tail. The programs that are causing this problem are good programs that must be adjusted, not necessarily eliminated. That adjustment will entail controls that will probably be very complicated because they will have different solutions in different parts of the country. Our government has never been good with complicated but this must be done or those good and necessary programs will be unable to stand up to scrutiny and therefore will be dismantled.
Bernie, AOC and the progressives want the right thing. They just have to figure out how to make it work before they ask for more of the same.
The poverty line in Florida where workers won’t do unskilled labor for $50 an hour is set at $86 thousand per year for a family of three. A family of three, living in Florida and making $86 thousand a year can only be considered poverty stricken in some woke wet dream. If the system there is set up for workers to receive benefits up to that number there is no reason for anyone to work unless you consider that someone has to pay the taxes that provide the dole.