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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Alighieri who wrote (531094)	11/20/2009 1:25:37 PM
From: TimF	2 Recommendations Respond to of 1576698

.the problem in the sentence is not that those who can find work will not work harder simply because extra earnings may mean that they lose a piddly federal subsidy for health care Its not a piddly subsidy, and its not the only one. Add it to all the other subsidies lost, and to the extra taxes paid, and for some people making more gross income could give them hundreds or thousands less in net income. The main thing driving people to work, and esp. to work hard, or to make investments in improving their job skills, or to move or go through other inconveniences to go to a job where they can achieve more, is the desire to make more money. Change things around so they don't make more, or even make less, in some cases significantly less and you rip out the incentives for the upper lower and lower middle class. If the set up with messed up incentives is not a very temporary thing, if you keep these perverse tax and benefit incentives in place for an extended duration, they are a more important issue than the current 10+% unemployment rate. the problem is the 10%, what it means to those who are looking for work, and the ones who have work as well... 1 - Again, if you keep these perverse tax and benefit incentives in place for an extended duration, they are a more important issue than the current 10+% unemployment rate. 2 - Problems aren't limited to one problem. 10+% unemployment is a problem. The perverse incentives I'm talking about are a problem, and there are many others. The 10+% unemployment rate doesn't make the perverse incentives any less of a problem. Also even if you want to focus only on the unemployment rate, the perverse incentives we are discussing make unemployment worse. Directly by discouraging people from taking very low end jobs, and indirectly by making the economy less dynamic, harming growth, and thus reducing the creation of new jobs.