Work is for suckers

The GOP has a golden opportunity, if it has the wit to grasp it. Mitt Romney was correct in bemoaning the reality that we have 47% of the population receiving a subsidy from the federal government, but he chose the wrong focus. Instead of framing the recipients as the problem (and be accused of insensitivity or worse), we must focus on the people who work themselves hard in order to make ends meet, and how unfair it is to penalize them, so as to bring them an after tax standard of living worse than they could have enjoyed by taking advantage of the myriad dependency subsidies available.

Our culture now revolves around victims, and it long past time that the GOP exploited the favorite technique of the left. It is time to call hard working Americans an "endangered species."

"Tyler Durden" at Zerohedge has been writing about the crossover point at which income one might as well just take a permanent vacation and just collect benefits instead of rolling out of bed every morning and enduring wage slavery, as the left used to call it.

Exactly two years ago, some of the more politically biased progressive media outlets (who are quite adept at creating and taking down their own strawmen arguments, if not quite as adept at using an abacus, let alone a calculator) took offense at our article "In Entitlement America, The Head Of A Household Of Four Making Minimum Wage Has More Disposable Income Than A Family Making $60,000 A Year." In it we merely explained what has become the painful reality in America: for increasingly more it is now more lucrative - in the form of actual disposable income - to sit, do nothing, and collect various welfare entitlements, than to work. This is graphically, and very painfully confirmed, in the below chart from Gary Alexander, Secretary of Public Welfare, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (a state best known for its broke capital Harrisburg). As quantitied, and explained by Alexander, "the single mom is better off earnings gross income of $29,000 with $57,327 in net income & benefits than to earn gross income of $69,000 with net income and benefits of $57,045."

Alexander's full 24-page study can be accessed at the Zerohedge link. This is source material for a panoply of conservatives who can fashion tweets, jokes, blog posts, YouTube videos, and other creative endeavors that mock the left's policies and sympathize with all the people who are getting penalized for working hard. Here is but one of his charts:

Rick Moran wrote about Durden's piece yesterday.

For decades, there has been talk of establishing a "guaranteed income" for all Americans. It would seem unnecessary now. Many of the arguments against the guaranteed income have already come to pass; that giving people something for nothing has the potential to turn them into leeches and making chumps of anyone who struggles while working for a living.

And the problem will only become worse as middle class entitlements, of which Obamacare is the showpiece, will make working even less advantageous. It looks like about half of us will continue to work no matter how many goodies the government dangles in front of us. That won't last long. People resent being made chumps of almost as much as many resent others mooching off the sweat off their brow. Eventually, more and more of us will simply give in to the inevitable and allow government to take care of us.