Gov. Tom Corbett, of course:
Is Tom Corbett a socialist?
Crazy question, of course, for a Republican governor perhaps best known for suggesting Pennsylvania’s unemployed workers prefer receiving state benefits to actually hunkering down and finding a job. But consider two facts:
• Between January 2011 (when Corbett took office) and July of this year, the second-fastest job sector growth in Pennsylvania has been in accommodations and food service—basically low-paid hotel and restaurant jobs. The sector added 28,000 jobs during that time, second only to the health care and social assistance segment of the state economy, providing about a fifth of the state’s overall (meager) growth in jobs.
• As Alfred Lubriano detailed in Sunday’s Inquirer, about half of all non-managerial workers in the fast-food industry need public assistance to get by. The number is somewhat lower in Pennsylvania–about 42 percent–but the result is that state taxpayers still provide $204 million a year to provide food stamps, Medicaid and other forms of public assistance to fast-food employees.
Pennsylvania is far from alone, of course. According to the University of California Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education, more than $7 billion per year is spent annually providing such assistance to the employees of McDonald’s, Burger King and other fast-food restaurants—a taxpayer subsidy that helps all those for-profit companies avoid the responsibility of paying their workers a living wage. (And we won’t even mention the ag subsidies which lower the cost of the food those companies prepare.)
All of which means that the Corbett economy has been successful mostly in growing the kinds of jobs that require taxpayer assistance in order to be viable.
Hurray, capitalism!
Well, that’s what it’s designed to do.
No, Tom Corbett is not a socialist. He is a capitalist. Capitalists, otherwise known as sociopaths, always look to move any conceivable costs away from their beloved corporations, and onto those members of society who will bear the brunt of the consequences and costs of unwanted wastes or by-products.
This is called externalizing the true costs of doing business onto the less powerful members of society, so as to maximize profits for the tyrant, sociopath capitalist owners.
Socialists do not engage in such practices. Only sociopathic capitalists.
I notice a tendency in stories about these indirect subsidies to subsistence level employment to forget the enormous costs of the EITC. This was Bill Clinton’s minimum wage stifle.