And those food stamps? Yes, you'd better hope they are available next month. If not, that's a ton of money not being spent at small businesses all across this country. Oh, and its a ton of children and elders without money to buy food. (What's that? You didn't know the vast majority of welfare recipients are children, the aged, and the infirm?) So, they'll probably do REALLY well without adequate nutrition to get through the day. They're totally built for it.
So with our old folks tottering and our kids without food, what do you think that will do for our civic institutions? Are you willing to sit back while kids suffer? Or should we provide them with services?
Oh wait, what services can we provide them, without money?
Perhaps we'll just have our communities provide those services. What's that? A sizable portion of our workforce is out of work? They're not contributing any income right now? Huh. What might that do to our local tax collections? Yeah, those are going down too? Good thing we don't have any fixed expenses, like wastewater infrastructure, roads, schools, or any other negligible things that are only partially funded by the state in the first place, since most of the money comes from federal mechanisms; but I've gotten distracted - all those federal workers out of work.
Of course, we'd all rather these folks just pulled themselves up by their bootstraps. That easy ride they've been on, when they make substantially less than their peers, its going just swell right now. They should just go start their own small business and become a job creator! Oh, but now that there's fewer consumers in the marketplace, given that so many suddenly neither have jobs nor government benefits to spend, it stands to reason demand for consumer products will go down, so what's a bootstrapping young lad to do? Mow some lawns, only its fall, and the lawn he wanted to mow is owned by a veteran who, unfortunately, just lost his vet's benefits.
But rauc, you know what, you're probably right. Just because a huge portion of our workforce is out of work; and the trusted institutions we rely upon in ways we often don't think about or see in the day to day are not functioning; and our welfare systems are sputtering; this is probably all much ado about nothing. When the dust clears, the invisible hand will magically clean this up. Because, you know, its times like these when the social balance really tilts towards those who are struggling.
Is the sky falling? No. Our great experiment will survive this hiccup. Is it embarrassing that the country that controls 1/4 of the world's wealth can't pay our meager government bills? Yeah, it is. But we'll get past our redface and figure this out eventually. Meanwhile, please read that again, and make another snide comment about welfare, please, because there is nothing classier than being absurdly wealthy and ******* on the poor.
10/8/2013 12:05 AM (edited)