By Owen Paine on Wednesday March 7, 2007 12:54 PM
... a.k.a. "wage insurance."
Leading Dems love the notion:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/05/AR2007030501440.html?referrer=email
Familiar with the buzz phrase, "creative destruction"? Here's how it applies to factory jobs: destroy a $25 an hour job, create a $12 an hour job.
Enter wage insurance, to head off resistance to this benign and laudable process. Plans are rife, but here's the great Schumer's version:
... cover almost any displaced worker of any age who loses a job for almost any reason and takes a new one for lower pay. Workers who make less than $97,500 [are] eligible... benefit... a maximum of $20,000.Chintzy. But at least it'll be paid for out of a wealth tax, right? Wrong:
the cost of the program... roughly $3.5 billion annually... could be covered by adding $25 to every worker's annual unemployment tax.Yup, we jobblers collectively pay for the compacting of our wage structure by corporate creative destruction.
All nice and social-market like, eh? Sadism with a Swedish accent, one might call it -- except that the Swedes wouldn't have added the double injury of paying for it with a regressive flat tax. That's good old Amurrican know-how at work there.
