The Congressional Budget Office projects O’Care will cost 2.3 million people their job through 2021. And these are not burger-flipping part-timers—these are full-time workers. “CBO said the jobs figures largely represent Americans who will choose not to work rather than those who will lose their jobs or have their workweeks reduced because of the law,” reports The WSJ.
O’Care, or the right to healthcare, is the welfare Saul Alinsky, Richard Andrew Cloward, and Frances Fox Piven dreamed about. In Cloward-Piven’s piece in The Nation “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty” published in 1966 they wrote:
Several ways have been proposed for redistributing income through the federal government. It is not our purpose here to assess the relative merits of these plans, which are still undergoing debate and clarification. Whatever mechanism is eventually adopted, however, it must include certain features if it is not merely to perpetuate in a new guise the present evils of the public welfare system.
First, adequate levels of income must be assured.(Public welfare levels are astonishingly low; indeed, states typically define a “minimum” standard of living and then grant only a percentage of it, so that families are held well below what the government itself officially defines as the poverty level.) Furthermore, income should be distributed without requiring that recipients first divest themselves of their assets, as public welfare now does, there by pauperizing families as a condition of sustenance.
Second, the right to income must be guaranteed, or the oppression of the welfare poor will not be eliminated. Because benefits are conditional under the present public welfare system, submission to arbitrary governmental power is regularly made the price of sustenance. People have been coerced into attending literacy classes or participating in medical or vocational rehabilitation regimes, on pain of having their benefits terminated. Men are forced into labor on virtually any terms lest they forfeit their welfare aid. One can prize literacy, health and work, while still vigorously opposing the right of government to compel compliance with these values.
