President Obama gave his final State of the Union Address last Tuesday. In it, he mentioned something that turned a number of heads, maybe including yours. It was when he was speaking about employment and workers and so forth.
“Americans understand that at some point in their careers, in this new economy,” he said, “they may have to retool, they may have to retrain, but they shouldn’t lose what they’ve already worked so hard to build in the process.”
He mentioned bolstering Social Security and Medicare, and he talked up the Affordable Care Act for the eleventieth time, even correlating job growth to the number of people who have gotten themselves on the federal government’s health care database. But he also said how the ACA helps those who don’t have employer-based health coverage, so he considers the ACA a part of our nation’s “economic security.”
That’s how he led into his curious mention of a different insurance.
[T]here should be other ways parties can work together to improve economic security. Say a hardworking American loses his job, we shouldn’t just make sure he can get unemployment insurance; we should make sure that program encourages him to retrain for a business that’s ready to hire him. If that new job doesn’t pay as much, there should be a system of wage insurance in place so that he can still pay his bills.
I’ll get to more about that wage insurance later.
But I’d first like to say how the timing of economic security talk is pretty obtuse when the Dow Jones average is ten percent lower than it was about a month ago. The President charged his way through the subject once more anyway in his address to the nation over the weekend.
He began by declaring that Tuesday was his final SOTU address. That’s about the best thing he said in the entire recitation. The rest had to do with his plans for our “new economy,” a phrase he swiped from his Tuesday night speech.
Also like his speech from Tuesday, he slammed the men and women who create the jobs in our economy, persisting on his class warfare binge and pitting the hardworking little people versus the people “at the top” like all good Ivy League university-educated socialists should.
Again, he played up the “longest streak of private-sector job growth in our history” angle. This guy has a fetish for repeating the same things over and over.
“More than 14 million new jobs. An unemployment rate cut in half.”
Again, no mention of the more than 94 million who are not participating in the labor force. That’s over 14 million more than there were in the same time frame to which Obama referred.
But he had no problem waxing pathetic on the plight of American workers, “where even when folks have jobs, even when the economy is growing, it’s harder for working families to pull themselves out of poverty, harder for young people to start out on their careers, and tougher for workers to retire when they want to.” He said these “profound changes…began long before the Great Recession hit.”
That’s his way of saying we can’t fault him for it. It’s the product of our new economy, the one that government built with its roads and bridges and subsidies and stimuli and investments and all that happy horse hooey that the 62.6 percent who are actually working have fed to the enormous bureaucracy. It’s those workers he called “anxious.”
Yes, they’re anxious to finally be done with these eight long years of hope, these eight taxing years of change.
“It offends our fundamental American belief that everybody who works hard should be able to get ahead,” Obama stated–“it” being…the struggles of the working people, I think. Either that, or we’re supposed to be offended by hard workers who have the nerve to want more. The people who write his scripts are dreadful and banal, but they’re also usually transparent enough. Overall, it was easy to spot the manipulative phrasing where the expected reaction is supposed to be I’m a hard worker. It’s like he’s speaking directly to me. Obama totally gets me!
This man keeps making up these “fundamental American beliefs.” Simply working hard should not guarantee that someone gets ahead. Life is a competition, not a first-grade soccer game at some bleeding-heart elementary school where everyone gets a trophy for participating. There are winners. There are losers.
Among our unalienable rights is the pursuit of happiness, not the surety of happiness. The independence that our nation’s forefathers declared gave us the freedom to excel. Independence gives us the choice to work harder and smarter than the rest so that we can reap the benefits of that work. It also gives us the choice to do the same work every day, knowing we could do better or we could do different, but we don’t try.
And you know, that’s fine. But then don’t complain that the world owes you more for the same work you’ve been doing. If you don’t like what you get, you take a chance and go a different route.
Obama spoke of fighting to give families more opportunity and security by creating more good jobs, investing (!) in the middle class, and helping working people get a raise.
About those three approaches toward opportunity and security:
1. Define “good jobs” that the government creates. One example of the kind of jobs government creates that comes to mind are the jobs it created–then later lost–in the clean energy industry. What a waste of money that was.
2. How does a government “invest” in a class of people? That makes no sense. If he was referring to more education funding, we spend more and more on education, yet the results have not been worth the “investment.” Spending more tax money isn’t the solution. The focus needs to be on fixing the system so that students come first, not standardizing tests and wailing about collective bargaining “rights.” We also can’t stress enough the vital role that parents must serve toward their kids’ futures, too.
3. The $15 an hour minimum wage that they’re fighting for will only harm working people in the long run–on every income level. The wage fighters will find that out soon enough when their positions are filled by machines.
He then said almost the same thing verbatim that he did in the State of the Union address concerning the benefits of Obamacare in the new economy.
First, what he said last Tuesday:
That, by the way, is what the Affordable Care Act is all about. It’s about filling the gaps in employer-based care so that when you lose a job, or you go back to school, or you strike out and launch that new business, you’ll still have coverage.
Next, the utterances in his weekly address:
It’s what the Affordable Care Act is all about–filling in the gaps in employer-based care so that when somebody loses a job, or goes back to school, or starts that new business, they still have health care.
By repeating it nearly word-for-word, he was trying to make it clear how he’s helping so many, in case no one heard him the first time.
Here I thought the ACA was about ruining the health care system so that America will demand a single-payer system. But maybe I’m reading too much into it.
It’s all part of his plan to “modernize our unemployment insurance system.”
Modernize, socialize. Potato, more free dough.
Here’s where Obama finally got around to promoting this notion of wage insurance, which he’s been pushing since 2011. Something else to get the plebeians to adore him. In his weekly address, he worded his plan in a way that he thought would appeal to the “forgotten” half of the population.
If a hardworking American loses her job, regardless of what state she lives in, we should make sure she can get unemployment insurance and some help to retrain for her next job. If she’s been unemployed for a while, we should reach out to her and connect her with career counseling. And if she finds a new job that doesn’t pay as much as her old one, we should offer some wage insurance that helps her pay her bills.
The entire passage just reeks of pandering. Obviously, there was no way it could have been worded in a gender-neutral fashion. Cheeze-Its.
This is how his proposed wage insurance idea would work, in his words:
Under my plan, experienced workers who now make less than $50,000 could replace half of their lost wages–up to $10,000 over two years.
So someone could make a free five grand a year by taking a job with fewer responsibilities and skills. It’s not a nation’s burden to cover someone’s bills when that person doesn’t get a job that pays as well as the last one. This wage insurance thing would encourage people to voluntarily decide they don’t want to do that old line of work anymore. They would feel they can get by doing less work for less pay since the government’s going to make up at least some of the difference. And that would leave a long-lasting effect on our nation’s productivity.
People in favor of a wage insurance plan believe that it is an incentive for people to seek higher wages since it doesn’t pay enough to the point where they make the same amount of money they used to make. But not getting free money is an even greater motivation.
Wage insurance is a disincentive to working smarter, let alone harder. When you know you could get paid a bonus to work in a lesser field than you used to be in, there’s nothing but personal drive that would make you want to go back to the higher-paying job. But personal drive becomes less and less of a priority as others take care of more and more areas of our lives. We’ve somehow survived this long without wage insurance. We can continue to survive without it. But as plans like this gain traction, when politicians and the media keep promoting them, an idiocracy is likelier by the day.
According to some of the articles I’ve read about Obama’s wage insurance brainchildclumpofcells, this idea has bipartisan support. Some Republicans supposedly like wage insurance because it keeps people from being unemployed. If it’s true that Republicans think wage insurance is radical, dude, we should know who they are. Democrats obviously like the idea because free money.
I saw a name appear in several of these articles I read. Robert LaLonde, an economist from the University of Chicago (go figure), wrote a report for the Council on Foreign Relations titled “The Case for Wage Insurance” in 2007. I would guess that’s where the White House got the idea.
LaLonde wrote that unemployment insurance and job training don’t do enough. So this “displacement insurance,” a term I’m sure that Obama and other liberals will adopt once the other side starts to get wind of it, is designed to help mainly older workers who have a lot of experience in a particular field. The problem with implementing this now is that most of those displaced experienced workers have been out of their old line of work for many years and would have no way to take advantage of such a program. And a whole lot of those jobs are gone for good–either eliminated, lost to another country, or people younger and cheaper have filled those positions. So there’s not much point in implementing such a program now.
The Brookings Institution, a social policy think tank based in Washington, D.C., also has authors who have written papers on the subject of wage insurance, which some in the media have noted. One of those authors goes by the name of Robert Litan who, like LaLonde, has connections with the Council on Foreign Relations. When writing about Obama’s latest SOTU in a Wall Street Journal column over the weekend, Litan said it was “ironic” that wage insurance would come up now that the unemployment rate is so low. Ironic wouldn’t be the word I would use. I would say the word is “stupid.” Litan wrote that it’s better late than never. I would say that never is best of all. But never mind what I think because I don’t call myself an economist.
Obama plans to include wage insurance as well as an extension of unemployment benefits in the budget he’ll release next month. He wants to require that all states provide 26 weeks of unemployment insurance because some states right now provide less than that. He also wants the federal government to provide funding for states that may suffer a large amount of job losses so that people would receive up to 52 weeks of unemployment benefits. If it wasn’t Obama, it would seem odd to pile on the entitlements since things are improving so well, as he claims.
But this is Obama. He still has some i’s to punctuate and some t’s to fritter away before he leaves office. Or maybe he knows something ominous is approaching in our “new economy” that the rest of us don’t.
Obama said some other things at the end of his address. More platitudes and clichés about opportunity, security, the land that we love, hardworking families, and how he’ll be fighting for all of that until the end of his presidency.
Steel yourself, America. Obama isn’t through with us yet.
