How Do You Talk Reasonably With a Liberal?

The other day I made an observation on a social media network; that borrowed from something Professor William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection said in one of his posts.  It spoke to the President proposing to send employers $4,000 if they hired an individual who had been out of work for six months.

Professor Jacobson did a nice job of showing how a $40,000 job cost the employer $65,000 and the $4K the President was offering would do nothing to incentivize the employer; it would just pay him/her for a decision they would make regardless.   So in effect it was throwing tax dollars at someone without a good reason to do so.

The response from my liberal friends was predictable.  I didn’t know what I was talking about, the President wasn’t doing this to pay people who were already planning to hire someone, he was doing this to pay people who weren’t going to hire anyone, besides most people don’t make $40,000 dollars.  So I changed the analogy to show how even to create a full time minimum wage job it would cost about $20 - 25,000 and it was unlikely the appeal of a $4,000 gift from the government would lead an employer to do something they weren’t planning to do already.  The response to this was to say I should look at it from the worker’s point of view.  In fact here is the response.

Okay - Let's look at the math a different way - and NOT from the EMPLOYER's point of view. Let's look at it from the WORKER's Point of view - and especially those THOUSANDS of workers who are NOT - Working! ... How much unemployment benefit do you think they are making a week - which is taxable? .. Does it add up to what your Corporate America is so afraid to spend? ... AND - that OLD way of thinking about taxes that an Employer pays on each employee is outdated. I do payroll every month and it is NOT as much as it used to be - mostly because of things like health savings plan deductions - BEFORE taxes get assessed. It's a whole different ballgame, John. The OLD thinking just does NOT apply any more. It's time for a CHANGE.

This was so convoluted that I really didn’t know what to say, fortunately I had posted a nice video from Bill Whittle just a short time ago that helped me understand how this all plays out.  I was looking forward to round two, but someone else attempted to explain and it went just as smoothly.  So I decided to just let it go.  But if this is typical of the reasoning Liberals use it is no wonder we have a problem here.