Government works hard at one thing, Ruining Our Lives! Victims of the Common Good

Our government's time and money thieves, just gangsters with badges and acronyms. m/r



Victims of the Common Good | The American Spectator

The CBO on Obama's bifurcated economy.

By Matt Purple – 2.5.14

“We’re going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good.” So said Hillary Clinton at a fundraiser back in 2004. Conservatives, in a rush to tag Clinton as a Marxist, sometimes strip out the context; she was talking about repealing President Bush’s tax cuts. But her remark is a nice motto for modern progressivism, which constantly demands that the rich finance a bulging public sector that acts for the common good.

This has been the theoretical foundation of the Obama presidency. The stimulus would borrow from a wealthier future generation to energize the economy. Obamacare would take resources from the health insurance companies and give them to the uninsured. Repealing part of the Bush tax cuts would force the rich to “pay their fair share” for programs to help the poor. The government, having defined the common good, then gets to enforce it on its own terms. It’s a nice gig, if you can get it.

The problem is, it’s spectacularly backfiring. Take yesterday’s report from the Congressional Budget Office. The above-the-fold headline was that the CBO is predicting a lower deficit for 2014 than it had last year. But the real news is that the accounting agency is increasing its projection of how many full-time employees Obamacare will eliminate from the workforce—by a long shot. The CBO had previously calculated the health law would kill about 800,000 jobs by 2024; now they’re estimating 2.5 million.

Only a few days earlier, the Brookings Institution released a study that examined the effects of Obamacare on each income decile (the poorest one tenth through the wealthiest one tenth). While the researchers found that the lowest two tenths of income distribution will be better off, the remaining deciles will see their incomes shrink thanks to the health law. For the fourth decile—close to the median; certainly among the middle class—the result would be a net 1.1 percent loss of income.

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