

Social safety net harmful to economic growth? - spottiness
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2011/07/25/social-safety-net-harmful-to-economic-growth/

======
yzhengyu
If its economic growth you want, you should move to China. But not as an
overseas expatriate but as a Foxconn factory worker earning below China's
mandated minimum wage and long hours beyond government sanctioned safety
limits.

Or you can just move here to my country, Singapore, as a lowly paid foreign
labourer being exploited in the same manner.

The problem I personally have with the majority of right wing ideologues I
encounter in my daily life is that they suffer from massive cognitive
dissonance and subscribe to various variants of the Horatio Alger myth.

They don't really like it when you call upon their logical fallacies and
expose the inherent asymmetries and flaws within existing public education,
healthcare and pension fund systems. And then they troll me by calling me
naive, etc.

I find it really amusing.

------
burnblue
His argument doesn't make sense. Personal savings don't get reinvested in
capital equipment, corporate savings do. Corporate savings are being spent on
all-time record CEO paychecks. Companies aren't investing in capital equipment
because there is no demand. People are saving, not spending, because there is
no safety net and now they have no ballooning home value to buoy their
consumer habits. No spending = no economic recovery. A strong safety net won't
solve everything, but in this case Greenspun seems to have things exactly
backwards.

------
jfruh
"Economic growth" for who, is the question. Would you rather live in a country
that has a better performing economy in the aggregate even if it means the
median (not the mean) citizen is worse off?

