[Breitbart] The Champ era has given us a very expensive lesson in how employment has a strong demand component. Unemployment rises not just because the supply of jobs has diminished, but because people aren't looking for work as aggressively as they might be.That seems like a common-sense observation, but it has huge public policy implications. It's an article of faith on the Left that welfare and redistribution programs have no significant negative impact on the workforce. Nearly everyone wants to work, we are told; the only reason they can't get jobs is that greedy fat cat capitalists tuck their filthy money into treasure vaults instead of using it to hire people. The notion that welfare might make poverty worse, by providing incentives to remain poor and dependent instead of working, is anathema to our titanic social welfare state.
One of the many arguments born from this belief, which we heard quite a bit of during the recent observation of the Great Society's 50th anniversary, is that compassionate government's core mission is to make poverty more comfortable, rather than seeing to reduce it. This was offered as the counter-argument to charges that the Great Society was a failure because poverty is at least as widespread as ever, despite trillions spent in a "war" against it. Evidence that generous welfare benefits increase dependency and erode the workforce is extremely damaging to arguments that poverty is essentially a constant, and the best we can do is try to make it more bearable.
