Requiring people to work is mean!

Money for nothing and chicks for free.

The Dire Straits hit the nail on the head. If you could be a rock star–or in today’s world, an “influencer”–the money rolls in for what seems like not much work and quite a bit of fun. That is, for many, the ideal life.

People value leisure, as they should. While some fraction of us see our work as fulfilling, for the vast majority of people over the course of history it has been drudgery. Who wakes up desperate to begin a day of backbreaking labor, or a day spent in a cubicle? Work is the price we pay to afford a better life. It was thus when we were hunter-gatherers, and it is thus today.

Well, Mother Jones is a big believer in rewarding leisure, and sees Republicans’ imposing work requirements as a condition for government subsidies as evidence that they are “about a commitment…to harm the poor.”

Yep. Mother Jones believes that it is the responsibility of people who work to earn a living to spend a good chunk of our working hours in order to ensure that others don’t work. Not wanting to put in the hours to ensure that able-bodied adults can stay home with their TVs can only be motivated by a desire to harm them.

“They’re about a commitment by the modern Republican Party to harm the poor, really” —@just_shelter https://t.co/7WloFV7gSY

— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) May 21, 2023

3, 2, 1…ah! There it is! The accusation of racism! I knew it was coming!

No. It doesn’t matter your race, if you are able to work but refuse to, or even refuse to engage in training programs, you should suffer the consequences. Liberals seem to think that not wanting to subsidize the lifestyle of others who won’t get off their butts is mean. In reality, it is the only incentive we can provide to encourage people to get out of an unrelenting cycle of poverty.

Being poor and depending upon the government for your sustenance is a terrible life, and unsurprisingly is highly correlated with poor life outcomes, including winding up in jail. Work is the only way to reliably get ahead in life, and only through work can you develop skills that others want to pay increasing amounts of money for.

It is Leftists, not conservatives, who are desperate to keep people in poverty. Poor people are their meal ticket, their excuse for grabbing more money and power, and their reliable voting bloc. Working people–particularly people who aren’t in the laptop class–are their class enemies, not their voting bloc.

So the Left is committed to keeping people poor, and the best way to do that is to pay them some money to do so. Make welfare payments modest, but better than an entry-level job. Make people into chumps for getting off the dole and climbing the economic ladder.

Minimum wages are starting wages. They are not meant to be living wages, but the first step in the ladder. Learn some skills and start climbing. If you are still making minimum wage (secret: almost nobody is today because of the labor shortage) in a year you are a troubled person.

Learn a trade–the Republican work requirements include training as work–and you can be making better bucks than the average Gender Studies major in a year or two. My nephew went to college in economics, and after a few years decided to become an electrician. He loves it, and makes better money than I do.

Still, Princeton sociologist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Matthew Desmond believes requiring people to work is cruel. Or rather, he claims to believe it–I am no longer convinced of the goodwill of any Leftist. The war on poverty is over half a century old and has done little to eliminate generational poverty–it seems to have entrenched it.

The dirty secret, too, is that with the exception of homeless people, the average “poor” person does well in America if you count government subsidies. We pay people to be poor. Income inequality is measured without including the value of government subsidies and payments, so income inequality is vastly overstated.

Counting only money income distorts everything. The CATO Institute exploded the myths pushed by the welfare pushers, demonstrating that poverty is vastly overstated in America. How many poor people don’t have a big-screen TV, cable, expensive smartphones, air conditioning, cars, and other luxuries? Compare a poor person in the United States to the average income person in Europe and the differences are much smaller than you would expect.

two-thirds of transfer payments are not counted by Census when computing the official measure of money income.

The Census Bureau excludes more than 100 transfer programs, such as the Treasury Department checks that pay low-income households refundable tax credits in excess of their tax liabilities, food-stamp debit cards, and doctor bills paid by Medicaid.

Adding those missing transfer payments increases earned income in the bottom quintile by almost 700 percent and in the second quintile by more than 70 percent. For higher quintiles, the missing transfer payments are small and mostly from Medicare for seniors.

Total transfer payments reduce income inequality by 90 percent, from 60.3 to 1 to 5.7 to 1.

Finally, the official income numbers make no adjustment for the loss of income to taxes.

In the bottom quintile, only 7 percent of household income is lost to taxes, but in the top quintile, 35 percent, or five times as much, is lost.

Think about that for a moment. Income inequality is the excuse for increasing subsidies; but those subsidies are almost never counted in income, so the income inequality never goes down, requiring more uncounted subsidies. It is a scam, and not one perpetrated by the poor upon the wealthier, but by the Left upon everybody else. They are paying people to stay unemployed and unemployable, and hence as clients of the Left.

It is not cruelty to impose work requirements on able-bodied people; it is kindness. Work can liberate people from dependence, increase freedom, and promise a better life to people who start climbing the economic and social ladder.

In short, earned income inequality has risen because some people have been induced to work less by the availability of greater government transfer payments while others have increased their capabilities with more education and worked more to promote their households’ well‐​being.

The Left is desperate to keep the money-poor just well-paid enough to choose not to work. Eloise Anderson, who helped design and implement Wisconsin Works decades ago, grew up poor. She described how government welfare programs turned people into “chumps” for getting a starter job. You wound up poorer working than staying on welfare, so many didn’t even bother.

Sure, they were making a long-term mistake, but a rational short-term decision. And since the Left keeps screaming that “the man” will never let you get ahead anyway, getting on the work treadmill seemed stupid.

So people wind up opting for more leisure and worse lives, and in many cases, they wind up committing crimes–because again the Left encourages it.

The Left is all about promising “money for nothing and chicks for free,” but the truth is that it is a trap they have laid for people at the bottom rung of the economic ladder.

So who is being cruel? The people saying “Get off your butt and get to work?” Or the people who implore the poor to stay poor and depend upon the government?

NOTE: updated to clean up some grammar and a mispell.