And what do you get?
Heather Cox Richardson gives her take for Georgia’s Governor Kemp’s (R) hurried rush to reopen for business:
The state’s unemployment fund has about $2.6 billion. The shutdown has made claims skyrocket—Chidi says the fund will empty in about 28 weeks. There is no easy way to replenish the account because Georgia has recently set a limit on income taxes that cannot be overridden without a constitutional amendment. It cannot borrow enough to cover the fund either, because by law Georgia can’t borrow more than 5% of its previous year’s revenue in any year, and any borrowing must be repaid in full before the state can borrow any more.
By ending the business closures, Kemp guarantees that workers can no longer claim they are involuntarily unemployed, and so cannot claim unemployment benefits. [Georgia journalist George] Chidi notes that the order did not include banks, software firms, factories, or schools. It covered businesses usually staffed by poorer people that Kemp wants to keep off the unemployment rolls. …
The modern Republican program calls for the end to business regulation, social welfare programs, and infrastructure development, with the idea that freedom from restraint will allow businesses to thrive and the country will prosper in turn.
To bring their ideology to life, Republicans have slashed regulation, taxation, and social programs. Under such a regime, a few individuals have done very well indeed, while the majority of Americans has fallen behind. Georgia has been aggressive in putting the Republican program into action.
The classic blind belief in the Laffer Curve, essentially. And while a premature reopening order may bring Georgia an encouraging start, they may end up strangling on their, er, stranglehold on government spending.
That is, if they, quite literally, survive long enough to experience it:
This is the logical outcome of an ideology of radical individualism: as one Tennessee protester’s sign put it “Sacrifice the weak/Reopen T[ennessee].” In 1883, during a time of similar discussions over the responsibility of government to provide a social safety net, Yale sociologist William Graham Sumner wrote a famous book: What Social Classes Owe to Each Other. Sumner’s answer was… nothing. Sumner argued that protecting the weak was actually bad for society because it wasted resources and would permit weaker people to dilute the population. Far from helping poorer Americans, the government should let them die out for the good of society.
Sumner wanted the government to stay out of social welfare programs, but thought it should continue to protect businesses, which men like Sumner believed helped everyone.
Sumner, whoever he is, sounds like he didn’t pay a lot of attention to history or the human condition. In this case, neglecting the working class in the mistaken belief that the businesses, besotted with higher and higher profits via such efficiency measures as automation, will come through and take care of them won’t just result in a poverty stricken working class.
It’ll result in violence.
And now mix in the conservative belief in an absolutist Second Amendment, including the immense fire power modern weaponry can put in the hands of an individual (compare to: Pitchfork and torch). The dominant political class in Georgia will be putting their collective necks at risk if Richardson and Chidi, above, are correct in their assertions. Their only hope may be getting voted out of office for gross incompetency.
