Seven tired left-wing arguments and why they fail.

Reich's noise-making is about the politics of distraction, misdirecting public attention, trying to change the national political conversation moving it away from the stagnant economy, the failing ObamaCare

Robert Reich’s Revolutionary Rants

To distract from Barack Obama’s failing presidency and the misery it is causing millions of Americans, leftist gadfly Robert Reich is wheeling out tired old paranoid rhetoric about class warfare and “inequality.”



Using language out of the Communist Manifesto, Reich inveighs against an invisible, cartoonish, Monopoly Man-type villain. Of course, Reich has no interest in talking about the vicious war that President Obama and his allies are waging against productive members of society, those who have affordable health insurance, and those who pay the taxes used up by the nonproductive.

Long a thuggish shill of the now-dying labor movement, Reich rants that

“Opposing a minimum wage hike, blocking unemployment insurance, cutting food stamps, keeping millions from accessing Medicaid ... I believe these positions are part of a concerted effort to keep struggling folks down that represents nothing less than a war on the poor and working class.”

Although poll after poll has shown that “inequality” doesn’t register on American voters’ radar screens, Reich and the Left are pushing hard to raise the federal minimum wage, a move that will hit the young, especially young people of color, the hardest. Under 3 percent of all workers in the nation (and an even lower percentage of full-time workers) earn the minimum wage.



Hiking the minimum wage has never been about helping low-income people. In fact it has racist origins and was originally used to hurt minorities.http://amarillo.com/opinion/opinion-columnist/weekly-opinion-columnist/2013-03-05/williams-minimum-wage-has-racist It doesn’t help fast food workers. Increasing the minimum wage would benefit wealthier, white teens at the expense of minority teens, according to American Action Forum:http://freebeacon.com/study-minimum-wage-hike-would-do-little-to-alleviate-poverty/

“Instead of combating income inequality, an increase in the minimum wage may actually enlarge the income gap by limiting earnings from those who need them most (the jobless) and directing them to those who need it least, the top 20% of earners.”

Those living below the poverty line are more likely to be unemployed, as opposed to earning a minimum wage, so they probably wouldn’t benefit from hiking the wage rate, Doug Holtz-Eakin, head of American Action Forum and a former Congressional Budget Office director.

“Minimum wage jobs are meant to be stepping stones, in which workers find internal promotions,” Holtz-Eakin said. “The key to not being poor is work. You have to have a robustly growing economy with job opportunities and we haven’t had that over the past five years.”

“If you raise the minimum wage and stop someone from getting hired, you’re transferring wages from the unemployed to someone already working,” he said.

In Europe unsustainable employee costs are forcing restaurants to replace fast food order-takers with machines, and plans are in place for automated food preparation. It will happen here too, especially in places like SeaTac, Wash., where voters recently approved a job-killing $15-an-hour minimum wage.

The minimum wage eliminates jobs from the workforce, forcing people onto welfare, and helps unions by restricting competition among those offering their labor. People who are dependent on the government tend to support Democrats.

Raising the hourly minimum wage, whether to $9, $10.10 as President Obama proposes, or $15, isn’t really about helping people.

It’s about recruiting voters and creating dependent Americans who will help to perpetuate the power of the Democratic Party.

Like mom, apple pie, and puppies, increasing the minimum wage often scores well in opinion polls. Left-wing activist groups support raising the minimum wage because it helps them to mobilize voters and their own troops.

ACORN used to put minimum wage propositions on the ballot in order to drive up turn out among poor voters. “We would like it to become a fact of political life where every year the other side has to contend with a minimum wage law in some state,” said Jen Kern, director of ACORN’s Living Wage Resource Center.

“This is what moves people to the polls now. This is our gay marriage,” she said a few years ago in a reference to the now-abandoned conservative tactic of putting anti-same sex referendums on the ballot in order to drive up conservative voter turnout.

But facts matter little to Reich, a radical true believer and undistinguished left-wing economist with the gift of gab who served as President Clinton’s labor secretary. Reich is repackaging the arguments that “social justice” crusaders have long used to prey on the naive and ignorant.http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2023

Reich is doing this in part to promote his new movie, Inequality for All. Reich says his piece of radical agitprop is aimed at ensuring there is “upward mobility again, in our society and in our economy.”http://billmoyers.com/segment/robert-reich%E2%80%99s-plan-for-fixing-america%E2%80%99s-economy/

Getting Americans politically involved will help “change the rules” that he falsely claims contributed to the recession that began under George W. Bush and has since intensified under Barack Obama.

In a new MoveOn video,http://front.moveon.org/war_on_the_poor_reich/#.UvlA9n-9KSM Reich accuses mysterious, unnamed forces—he calls them “they”—of plotting against low-income people. This rhetorical use of the pronoun they ought to be referred to as the Paranoid Third Person. It’s a staple of conspiracy theorists, community organizers, and Saul Alinsky devotees and it’s part of the same whiny refrain we’ve been hearing from Reich and his Sixties leftover friends like Roger Hickey for decades now.http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1183

It ties in well with the current work of MoveOn, the leftist group that was created to get the neo-Marxists of the modern Democratic Party back on-message by distracting from Bill Clinton’s Oval Office sexual affair with a young intern. True to form, MoveOn is now bringing up marginal or irrelevant economic issues to bail out Barack Obama.

Invisible forces are conspiring against poor and working-class Americans, according to Reich. “What are they really after?”

In his musings, Reich urges viewers to “connect these seven dots.” Cue the violins:

“They’re against extending unemployment benefits to people who have been out of work for more than six months even though there’s still only one job for every three unemployed.
They don’t want to raise the minimum wage even though today’s federal minimum is 25 percent below what it was in 1968, adjusted for inflation.
They’re against extending Medicaid benefits to millions of low-wage workers
They want to cut food stamps.
They refuse to invest in education or job training.
They don’t want to rebuild America’s crumbling infrastructure or have any other jobs programs.
They’re out to bust unions.”
Like any good snake oil salesman, he offers up a simplistic solution:

“Do you see a pattern here? They’re waging a war against the poor and the working class in order to keep people down because when you’re unemployed, without any support, without any bargaining power and you have to feed your family, you’re desperate, and when you’re desperate you’ll take whatever they are willing to pay you even if it’s next to nothing. And you won’t dare make a fuss. You won’t complain about unsafe work conditions or toxic chemicals leaking out of storage tanks or anything else. You won’t run the risk of trying to form a union. You won’t get involved in politics. You won’t make a ruckus or rock the boat in any way. You’ll take whatever they choose to give you because you are sinking. Make no mistake this war against the poor and working class is designed to make sure Americans who’ve been losing ground for 30 years don’t dare do anything about it. Without extended unemployment benefits, a declining real minimum wage, no Medicaid, no food stamps, no education, job training, or jobs program, and no union, you’ll do exactly as they tell you and that’s fine with them but it’s bad for America.”

This litany of nonsense and overblown rhetoric is what we’ve come to expect from Reich and his ilk.

This is Chicken Little, Erin Brockovich-style horror propaganda that has no relationship to life in the real world. In our severely over-regulated society Americans aren’t at peril from unsafe work conditions or toxic chemicals. Americans aren’t dropping dead because of “crumbling” highways. They aren’t clamoring to join unions, which they correctly view as obstacles to progress and self-advancement. No one is trying to abolish the social safety net, get rid of food stamps, Medicaid, or government-subsidized education and job training.http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/kathy-shaidle/they%E2%80%99re-called-boobs-the-toxic-lies-of-erin-brockovich/

But telling the truth isn’t good for recruiting.

Reich needs to sell an apocalyptic fantasy in order to hoodwink Americans into joining his cause. In fact Reich and his friends in the Obama administration are the ones waging war against the poor and workers, creating more poor people, more unemployed people, more underemployed people, and driving people out of the labor force altogether. With the national debt closing in on $17.3 trillion and the trillions of dollars wasted over the years on the War on Poverty, Americans have little to show after decades of following the policy prescriptions of the Left.

Reich’s noise-making is about the politics of distraction, misdirecting public attention, trying to change the national political conversation, moving it away from the stagnant economy, the failing ObamaCare program, the political scandals that are becoming too numerous to count, and the other grave problems in American society that left-wingers have caused and exacerbated.

Given the mainstream media’s continuing love affair with the telegenic Reich, he’s likely to be in the spotlight, deceiving the American public, for a long time to come.


========================================================================

Seven tired left-wing arguments and why they fail.
Refuting Robert Reich

Former Clinton Labor Secretary and lifelong leftist Robert Reich has put together a video for MoveOn.org explaining how America is conducting a “war” on poor and working families. “What are they really after?” Reich asks, never bothering to explain who “they” are. He proceeds to connect “seven dots” that together indicate that a cabal of class oppressors is drowning the poor with their opposition to big-government dependency programs.http://front.moveon.org/war_on_the_poor_reich/#.UvzUvV5CD1y

http://moveon.org/



Reich’s spurious arguments, as outworn and tired as they are, deserve to be responded to individually. It should be no surprise that each of these proposed “solutions” does its own damage to the poor, while offering little in the way of lasting social amelioration:

1. “They’re against extending unemployment benefits for people who have been out of work for more than six months.”
The framing of this issue is nothing short of dishonest. On first inspection, someone unfamiliar with the recent history of unemployment compensation extensions on Capitol Hill might sympathize with the idea of extending benefits for those out of work for “more than six months.” Six months is not an unimaginable amount of time to be chronically unemployed in the Obama economy. The problem is, the benefit extension fight in Congress is not targeted just at workers who find themselves still treading water after six or seven months. Combined with state emergency benefits that usually last 26 weeks, federal add-ons raised that total to 73 weeks, meaning people were eligible to collect benefits for almost a year and half. This was an unprecedented extension of the unemployment compensation program, and many Americans justifiably question the wisdom of such exceedingly long durations of unemployment benefits.



One reason for this skepticism has to do with the indisputable capacity of benefit extensions to exacerbate long-term unemployment. Analyses conducted by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) concluded that such extensions over the past five years have kept more than 600,000 out of the labor force by paying people not to work.http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2014/01/05/unemployment-insurance-extensions-competitive-enterprise-institute-editorials-debates/4330603/ Those claims were echoed in a survey of recently unemployed people in New Jersey commissioned by Alan Krueger of Princeton University, and Andreas Mueller of the University of Stockholm. They discovered that after a burst of initial activity, people slack off on their jobs search and wait for something to happen. Moreover, more workers have been drawn into mire of unemployment due to the benefit extensions: Another study from the NBER concluded that unemployment benefit extensions have increased overall unemployment by over 3 percent.http://ideas.repec.org/e/pmu176.html

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/368047/study-extending-unemployment-benefits-increased-unemployment-more-3-percentage-points

Workers are not benefited by being encouraged to remain unemployed for such long periods of time. Long-term unemployment dulls skill sets and makes workers less attractive to potential employers. The longer workers are enticed to stay unemployed, the weaker their resumes become when they inevitably must reenter the job market.

Leaving this aside, if Reich’s bogeymen are meant to refer to Republican congressional leadership, his claim that “they are against” the benefits extension is also untrue. Republicans have approved renewal of the extension numerous times. This year, Republican lawmakers, led by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker John Boehner, requested that the renewal of the extension be offset elsewhere in the budget and accompanied by job-creations measures, which Democrats refused. If Democrats had conceded to these commonsense compromises, it is more than likely unemployment insurance extension would have been approved.http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303595404579321010229177576

2. “They don’t want to raise the minimum wage.”
A 2007 survey of 100 studies on the effects of raising the minimum wage was conducted David Neumark and William Wascher at the National Bureau of Economic Research. It revealed that a “sizable majority” of those studies, including those with the “most credible evidence” concluded that raising the minimum wage produced “negative employment effects, both for the United States as well as for many other countries.” Even more tellingly, “the studies that focus on the least-skilled groups provide relatively overwhelming evidence of stronger disemployment effects for these groups.”http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=961374

Furthermore, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) only 5 percent of hourly U.S. workers made the federal minimum wage or less in 2012. Among those earning it, 63 percent were second or third wage earners from households with incomes equal to three times the poverty line or more. Only 11.3 percent of workers who would benefit from the increase live in households officially designated as poor. As the BLS survey also reveals,  most minimum wage earners are young, part-time workers with an average family income of $53,000 per year. If Reich wishes to help teenage, middle class burger-flippers he might have a point. On the other hand, since raising the minimum wage would disproportionately affect the lower-skill workers he ostensibly champions, he does not.http://www.ibtimes.com/most-benefits-minimum-wage-increase-would-not-go-poor-households-1541342

http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2013/02/who-earns-the-minimum-wage-suburban-teenagers-not-single-parents

3. “They’re against extending Medicaid benefits.”
Unfortunately, the disaster known as ObamaCare is doing precisely that. More than double the number of people who have signed up for healthcare via the exchanges have enrolled in Medicaid. Since Medicaid is government-subsidized insurance, it is paid for by a combination of funds from state and federal budgets. Prior to its expansion under ObamaCare, Medicaid had already become the largest line item in a typical state’s budget, exceeding such items as public safety, infrastructure, roads and since 2009, education spending for kindergarten-through-12th-grade.http://freebeacon.com/factcheck-obamacare-and-the-state-of-the-union/

Yet there is a far bigger problem. Since Medicaid payments are 61 percent less that what private insurance pays, an increasing number of doctors refuse to accept new Medicaid patients.http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2013/11/physicians-hesitant-medicaid-patients.html “About half of the physicians in many communities refuse to take Medicaid patients because the payment system is just too low,” said James Capretta, of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Many doctors are still willing to take a certain percentage of such patients in order to fulfill a moral obligation, but they are not willing to put themselves out of business to do so. In other words, many Americans enrolled in Medicaid are going to discover a reality that invariably eludes people like Robert Reich: getting health insurance isn’t remotely the same thing as getting actual healthcare. Once again, as is so often the case with progressives, disastrous reality is obscured by good intentions.http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/12/26/doctor-wont-see-analysts-warn-obamacare-plans-could-resemble-medicaid/

4. “They want to cut food stamps.”
As with much of the progressive lexicon, “cut” is a euphemism. In reality, food stamp usage has exploded, with a record-setting one-in-five American households on the program in 2013, according to the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture. Furthermore, the cost of the program has increased a whopping 164 percent over the last decade, and 36.8 percent since the Obama administration assumed control in 2009. Thus a program that cost the nation $58.2 billion in 2009 cost $79.6 billion last year.http://cnsnews.com/news/article/ali-meyer/record-20-households-food-stamps-2013

http://www.fns.usda.gov/pd/16SNAPpartHH.htm

The latest Farm Bill under which the food stamp program operates does cut food stamp spending, but those cuts amount to $800 million per year, or approximately one percent of the overall total. A total that has grown exponentially, even as America remains saddled with a national debt of more than $17 trillion, along with unfunded liabilities that exceed $85 trillion.http://www.latinpost.com/articles/7126/20140211/president-obama-signs-farm-bill-what-will-the-cut-to-food-stamps-mean-for-you.htm

5. “They refuse to invest in education and job training.”
In reality the federal government alone has 47 job-training programs run by nine different agencies, according to the the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO). These programs cost the taxpayer $18 billion per year, and a 2011 report by the same GAO concluded that some of them are riddled with mismanagement, waste, fraud, abuse and corruption. The report further noted that since 2004, only 5 of the 47 agencies involved kept tabs on whether participants had actually secure jobs. “Little is known about the effectiveness of most programs,” the GAO concluded.http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/may/16/mitt-romney/mitt-romney-said-there-are-49-different-federal-jo/

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/05/17/senator-questions-18b-spent-on-job-training-as-study-suggest-rampant-waste/



As for education, the federal government spent $138 billion in FY2013. In both real dollars and as a percentage of GDP, the United States outspent most of the world’s developed nations in education. When one factors in vocational training and college as well, the United States outspends all of them. Yet if bang for the buck counts, America comes up woefully short, routinely scoring well below other nations on international exams.http://febp.newamerica.net/background-analysis/education-federal-budget

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-education-spending-tops-global-list-study-shows/

But this is only part of the story. Every one of America’s true educational wastelands—as in most of our major inner cities where graduation rates hover around 60 percent or less, where budgets are routinely on the verge of bankruptcy or already there, and where teachers unions fight tooth and nail for the miserable status quo—are Democrat strongholds. If Reich were truly interested in help the poor and working class Americans he professes to care so deeply about, he’d be far more interested in challenging that status quo, which revolves around the unholy alliance of education unions and a Democrat party beholden to their campaign contributions—and marching orders.http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/david-horowitz/atrocity/

6. “They don’t want to rebuild America’s crumbling infrastructure. ”
Reich has an exceedingly short memory. The American Recovery and Investment Act of 2009, more familiarly known as the stimulus bill, was supposed to target the lion’s share of its $787 billion appropriation (increased to $840 billion in 2012) on “shovel-ready jobs.” One year late,r President Obama admitted “there’s no such thing.” To be fair to Reich, infrastructure spending has taken a nosedive since its peak before the recession began, but it’s not because the state and local government that provide the vast majority of infrastructure spending don’t want to spend the money, it’s because they can’t afford to do so.
http://useconomy.about.com/od/candidatesandtheeconomy/a/Obama_Stimulus.htm

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/magazine/17obama-t.html?_r=3&ref=magazine&pagewanted=all%22

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/05/24/u-s-infrastructure-spending-has-plummeted-since-2008/

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/post/why-cant-we-just-leave-infrastructure-spending-to-the-states/2012/03/21/gIQAjpYBSS_blog.html


Yet even in the midst of such cuts, America spends more on infrastructure than the progressive stronghold known as the European Union, at 3.3 percent of our GDP from 2006-2011, compared to only 3.1 percent for the EU. The clamor for increased spending is all about doing it with more borrowed money, with the American Society of Civil Engineers (hardly a neutral entity) calling for a $3.6 trillion “investment” between now and 2020. Congress’s most recently passed budget allocates $108 billion for federal construction accounts.http://www.forbes.com/sites/paulroderickgregory/2013/04/01/infrastructure-gap-look-at-the-facts-we-spend-more-than-europe/

http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/

http://news.agc.org/2014/01/18/congress-passes-spending-bill-to-fund-government-in-2014-2/

The only way we will likely see more infrastructure spending is with a growing economy. Obama could contribute to that growth if he would approve the Keystone pipeline, among other things. Perhaps he could explain why he won’t to Robert Reich.

7. “They’re out to bust unions.”
Unions are doing a good job of busting themselves. Nothing speaks louder to this reality than the debacle they perpetrated in Wisconsin, where their thug-like tactics were rejected by both Republican Gov. Scott Walker and the voters themselves. As a result of Walker’s triumph, a projected $3 billion-plus deficit turned into a projected $300,000 surplus in 2011. Much of it was accomplished by getting government union members to pay for a portion of their own healthcare and pensions and eliminating automatic pay and benefit increases that are strangling states like New York, Illinois and California.http://pjmedia.com/blog/hey-who-wants-to-talk-about-wisconsins-economic-miracle/?singlepage=true

On the national level, a recent study by the Mackinac Center reveals that right-to-work states have seen greater improvements in employment rates, income, and population growth than non-right-to-work states over the last 60 years.http://www.mackinac.org/19051 Critics attempt to obscure this reality by pointing to the fact that states with right-to-work laws have lower per capita incomes. Yet they fail to factor in the cost of living, which is far more expensive in states where union monopolies push government budgets, and the taxes that pay for them, ever higher. When cost of living is factored in,  people in right-to-work states have 4.1 percent higher per-capita personal incomes than those in non-right-to-work states.http://www.michigancapitolconfidential.com/18222

Furthermore, in cities that have gone bankrupt, such as Stockton, and Detroit, the primary drivers of that bankruptcy were out-of-control legacy costs for government union workers. Of Detroit’s $12 billion in outstanding debt, $9.2 billion of it is comprised of health and pension benefits owed to retired workers. When the city filed for bankruptcy, it had 47 different public employee unions, and a worker at the Water and Sewer Dept. who collected $56,000 in pay and benefits for his job as a horse-shoer—despite the Dept. having no horses. Detroit also has three retired municipal workers collecting a pension for every two that are still working.http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/07/24/detriot-mess-why-future-stalled-in-motor-city/

According to Heritage Foundation’s chief economist Stephen Moore, more than 60 American cities may be facing the same fate as the Motor City. “Keep an eye on ‘too big to fail’ cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York,” he warned.http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com/2014/02/us-is-going-bankrupt-one-city-at-time.html

Moore goes on to cite the progressive ideology in general championed by Reich and others as the primary impetus for such failure. “For at least the last 20 years major U.S. cities have been playgrounds for left-wing experiments—high taxes on the rich; sanctuaries for illegal immigrants; super-minimum wage rules; strict gun-control laws; regulations and paperwork that makes it onerous to open a business or develop on your own property; crony capitalism with contracts going to political donors and friends; and failing schools ruled by teacher unions, with little competition or productivity.”

Despite Robert Reich’s assertions, what Americans really need to understand is that real war on the poor and working-class American is being waged by a Democrat party controlled by people who believe dependency is the key to their electoral success. Thus it is no accident that every major American city besieged by poverty, crime, economic dysfunction and failing schools is a Democratic stronghold. Moreover, as the New York Post’s, Michael Goodwin rightly puts it, Democrats’ “anti-job, pro-dependency tilt is the crux of the nation’s polarization,” because it pits “those who believe in the sanctity of work against those who believe in penalizing wealth and redistributing its fruits.”http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/big-dem-cities-big-dem-poverty/

http://nypost.com/2014/02/09/obama-democrats-troubling-view-on-work/

Nothing made this clearer than Democrats celebrating the equivalent loss of 2.5 million full-time jobs because Americans who get subsidized health insurance can “liberate” themselves from “job lock”—even as they conspicuously failed to mention that other Americans who still believe in the sanctity of work will be underwriting those subsidies. There is nothing new about Reich’s proposals. They merely reassert a long-held belief by the American left that success is measured by how many people they get on government programs, not off government programs. In a better nation, more Americas would “connect the dots” regarding the utter bankruptcy of such an insidious ideology.