Welfare and Wage Slavery

Recently, Barack Obama was accused of “gutting welfare reform” in some of Mitt Romney’s ads of which the following is an example:

This has been widely recognised as a distortion; PolitiFact calls it a “pants on fire” lie. In reality, Obama is allowing state governments to waive certain parts of the welfare reform’s performance measures in favour of alternatives, provided that there is evidence that the state is achieving the principle aim of the reforms–putting people on welfare to work.

That’s all widely known at this point. What I’d like to talk about today is why we really would be better off if Obama had in fact gutted American welfare reform. It’s a bold claim, and not a very politically popular one in the times in which we live, but hear me out. I propose that a welfare system with no demand or encouragement to reenter the workforce is in fact better for the capitalist system.

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The Demise of the Scientific Breakthrough?

Yesterday, I ran across a new paper from economist Robert Gordon that suggests that long-term innovation and technological development may be slowing, at least in the case of breakthrough technologies. I found Gordon’s paper interesting, and would like to use today’s post to discuss it and its possible future implications.

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Stimulus vs. Austerity: UK

Today I’d like to take a mental trip back across the pond and examine the current double dip recession in the United Kingdom, investigating the role it plays as a case study in the policy debate between advocates of stimulus (state spending increases) and advocates of austerity (state spending decreases).

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Fiscal Cliff Madness

Sneaking up on the US government, slowly but surely, is the fiscal cliff–the agreement congress made to cut spending across the board in many sensitive areas if a bipartisan deficit reduction plan could not be agreed to. This was a bad idea from the outset, but you wouldn’t know it from listening to the Democratic Party, and that’s both a problem, and the topic of today’s post.

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Stimulus vs. Austerity: USA

I keep seeing a certain political sentiment expressed. It goes a little something like this, from James Pethokoukis of the New York Post:

So what’s the problem with the Obama recovery? Why is it the weakest since the Great Depression?

Maybe it’s the Obama policies, like a stunning disregard for the trillion-dollar deficits that are likely already a dead weight on growth. Or maybe it’s the Obama guarantee of more tax hikes and regulation that makes US business too worried to hire and invest.

But it’s not too late to start shrinking unproductive government, cut debt and reduce penalties on work and investment — just like in those recoveries that we used to know.

Then there are the political cartoons, things like this:

Here’s the structure of the idea: