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Nancy Pelosi: Hey, quit your job. We got your back!

By: Tabitha Hale (Diary)  |  May 17th, 2010 at 02:59 PM  | 

RESIZE: AAA

Nancy Pelosi spoke at the Asian American and Pacific Islanders Summit on Capitol Hill last Friday, informing them that because of the new health care reform, they would no longer be “job locked.” Here’s the quote:

“We see it as an entrepreneurial bill,” Pelosi said, “a bill that says to someone, if you want to be creative and be a musician or whatever, you can leave your work, focus on your talent, your skill, your passion, your aspirations because you will have health care.”

That’s right. Did you know that you could just… not work? Utopia! Sit at home and paint. Sculpt. Dance. Play your harp on SoCal streets naked. Live the dream! Those evil rich people will totally just pick up the slack, too. They’ve got an endless supply of cash, and they shouldn’t be reaping their own rewards anyway, right? Just raise their taxes! What’s another tax hike for the sake of art?

No, I’m not exaggerating. Watch for yourself.

Translation: Just give your soul to the Democratic party and you’re golden! No need for these silly jobs – we have no idea how to create them anyway!

Slip of the tongue? Moment of weakness? Pandering? No. It’s a theme. Princess Pelosi in March:

“Think of an economy where people could be an artist or a photographer or a writer without worrying about keeping their day job in order to have health insurance.”

Democrats don’t care about jobs. They care about owning people and controlling everything they can find a way to control. This empty “follow your heart, you deserve it, we got your back” talk is disgusting and manipulative.

Just to break it down: They forgot to figure out how to pay for Obamatopia in the “fog of controversy” leading up to the vote. You may not be able to quit your job… but count on the high taxes and increased unemployment. Again.

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  • tngal

    Really, really want to give that a try. Hey does that h/c come with free dental, paid vacation. I mean I’d love to focus on my weaving but I have to have some tme off. Its grueling.

  • conservativecrusade

    is the best way to keep voters in line. These people are not stupid, they know what they are doing and are working on getting the majority so dependent on the democratic handouts, they no longer are able to vote based on principle. This type of mentality will kill drive, ambition, and individuality.

  • Composer_Man

    So . . . Nan’s definition of an entrepreneur is someone who quits a productive job to live on government handouts and indulge their hobbies?

    Talk about your “Newspeak”!!

    Here’s a quick definition from Wikipedia:

    An entrepreneur is a person who has possession of a new enterprise, venture or idea and assumes significant accountability for the inherent risks and the outcome. Entrepreneur in English is a term applied to the type of personality who is willing to take upon herself or himself a new venture or enterprise and accepts full responsibility for the outcome.

  • jomo2009

    is worried that someone is angling for her job.

  • patriot601

    If this was the mindset 50 years ago then we would have never landed on the moon or put a satellite into space. If this was the same mindset 30 years ago then we wouldn’t have the internet today.

    It’s time to fire “Stretch” and make her just another old hippie demonrat rep from the California Socialist Nation.

  • GT350

    Sounds a lot like France. They make it very comfortable for people to indulge in their creative sides.

    What was their structural unemployment rate again? And GDP growth over the last 2 decades? I forget.

  • ceili_dancer

    How many extra crash and burn episodes of American Idol there will be. I thought it was “Don’t quit your day job”.

  • http://twitter.com/michael_s_grant msgrant

    How many ACORN and ACLU/Media Matters types will suddenly become “artists” and “dancers” who need Gov. assistance…

  • liberalredstatereader

    (this thread is now pretty old, but I wrote the post before realizing there was a waiting period to post for new users…so better late than never)

    Hello RedStaters. I’m a liberal musician living in Nashville. Been reading and lurking for years. This is my first post, and it’s only because I have life experience in the subject matter at hand.

    Five years ago I was working at a large musical equipment manufacturer. I’d always been a musician, even had a public profile, but I took a day job ten years back when things got tight. Turns out I had a talent for project management. Five years later I was in upper management, responsible for a $10M division of the company. I was paid well, six figures. I had a great health plan. Cost me about $300 a year. And I was miserable.

    When I finally got real with myself and quit without a backup plan in 2005 to be a musician again, it was a big risk. I spent most of my savings riding out the transition. A lot of work and faith finally paid off – in 2007 I turned it all around. Now I make 75% of what I did before but I’m a much stronger member of my community because I’m a happier person. I donate more to charity, I hire outside contractors for studio and graphic art work, and I love what I do. Of course, I bust my ass 8-10 hours a day networking and booking gigs and other stuff, and I travel like crazy, but when you love what you do, it doesn’t feel like work. And it doesn’t.

    The ONE thing that stood out to me during the transition is the reason this admittedly long comment is relevant to this thread – my health care costs went from $300 a year to $2000 a year the second I quit and started paying COBRA. When my COBRA expired, I changed my excellent $1K-deductible coverage to essentially catastrophic care with a $10K deductible so I could get the premiums down to $1300 a year. I get that the choice to become an entrepreneur was my own, and that there are economic impacts to that, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to wonder why there isn’t a way for individual citizens to be able to use their collective leverage as a bargaining tool against insurance companies when the gulf between what’s available through a company and what’s available individually is so wide.

    So, two points: One, I would be wary of broad-brush generalizations when it comes to artists, especially musicians. There’s lots of professional conservative (as well as liberal!) musicians in Nashville busting their butts to feed their families, and I don’t think they’d fall quite so neatly into the category of deadbeats and dream-chasers just because they’d like a better deal on individual health insurance (most I know don’t have any, and it’s not by choice – when something serious happens they have a benefit concert and hope for the best). Two, I think there’s a valid point as to how the “job-lock” phenomenon can lead to a stifling of entreprenuerial spirit, and there appears to be a reverse incentive in terms of health care coverage. We want to incentivize people to take risks and open small businesses if they have a worthy idea, right?

    Granted, it didn’t stop me.

    Thoughts and comments welcome. Thanks to Moe, Erick, Neil & the gang for the open forum. We don’t agree, but it’s my opinion that we’re all after the same thing, albeit through different means.

    • ocleverone

      Congratulations on pursuing your first love of music. You are probably very good at it and I wish you well.

      That being said, I don’t want to pay for your choices. You chose to pursue a profession in which you knew you would have costs to bear for your own insurance – it was your choice. I had no say in the matter whether or not I would be responsible for additional costs so you could leave a job that did have benefits to pursue your first choice of careers.

      Heck, I want to be a runway model. Who will pony up to cover my face lift and tummy tuck? No one. If I would choose to pursue that dream, it would be my responsibility to make sure I could provide and pay my own way.

      • http://slcliberty.blogivists.com randy streu

        It’s great you got to do what you want. It’s also entirely on you if you fall on your a$$ or can’t cover the expenses. If you don’t want to deal with the consequences, go back to the day job.

        That’s the difference between dreamers and entrepreneurs. The former are still children waiting for a parent to clean it up when things go south, the latter are dreamers who have grown up and taken responsibility for their choices — and then made something of themselves.

      • liberalredstatereader

        First time here, so I appreciate the response.

        I get your opposition to paying for (or have government subsidize, with your tax dollars) a choice you’re not making – it was clearly and forcefully stated. But in reality, government already subsidizes choices we don’t make every day – current law provides tax breaks and subsidies for all kinds of stuff we ourselves may or may not want to pay for ourselves: farming, ethanol, home ownership, the list goes on. You’d like to think that these decisions (when not in the hands of relentless porkmeisters) are made with some kind of “what’s best for the American people” in mind, even though different people will arrive at different conclusions. So we can disagree – and vote our disagreements! – on what should and shouldn’t be incentivized through the legislative process, and by how much. But we’re not starting from scratch on that question either.

        I know we disagree on the mechanism, but it seems there should be a way for independently minded entrepreneurial liberals and conservatives alike to both be onboard for a change to the current system to strengthen the hand of individuals and startup sole proprietors in the health insurance market. Is there a way to get there without having it seem like you’re paying for someone else’s choices? Am I paying for other people’s choices to work for large employers right now? I’m not snarking, I’m honestly asking.

        The other point (and this is more to Tabitha than you, I admit) is this: partially what motivated me to post was the idea that artists and musicians in favor of this bill are in it for some kind of racket. From Tabitha’s post: “Did you know that you could just

        • ocleverone

          You state:

          “independently minded entrepreneurial liberals and conservatives alike to both be onboard for a change to the current system ”

          I can answer this easily – no. No because we come from two different sides of the argument.

          Liberals believe that it is the duty of everyone to help out to allow for someone to pursue their passion.

          Conservatives believe that it is the duty of the individual to help themselves out, creating ideas, to pursue their passion.

          • liberalredstatereader

            I get your construct, but I think it’s an general ideological statement more than a response to the issue.

            Still, let’s go into your construct – in it, the phrase “pursue their passion” is carrying a lot of weight. Replace the words “pursuing their passion” with “starting a small business” – should the government create policies which favor the starting of small businesses, if they’re the real engine of economic growth? Aren’t tax breaks for small businesses an example of that already in practice? Isn’t everyone “helping out” in that way already? Should we lose those tax breaks, simply to reinforce the idea that it’s up to the individual to succeed or fail? And if health care costs are 5 times as much for individuals who want to start a small business than it is from a plan at a large company, what does that incentivize? And how does the market address that? It hasn’t over the past 20 years, has it?

            I mean, if you’re coming at it from a true libertarian perspective and want to scrap the whole system, that’s a fair point. But if not, and you want major aspects of the current system to stay in place, I think the conversation about individual vs. group costs on the health insurance open market defies the typical liberal vs. conservative labels.

            Otherwise we’re all just incentivizing the calcification of the job market to a certain extent, aren’t we?

            Again, I appreciate the discussion.

          • ocleverone

            We are talking about INCREASING my and my family’s taxes to support a healthcare plan we neither want or need.

            I cannot follow your logic on losing tax breaks if one succeeds or fails. Sorry – it doesn’t make any sense. There is a far cry difference on giving someone a break on the taxes they would normally pay and forcing them to pay for someone else failures.

            Second, I do not want the government in my health records. They can’t keep track of census forms, why should I entrust them with my MRI (or my face lift when I quit my day job and become a runway model.)?

          • liberalredstatereader

            I have to go practice for a session! But one last shot at this.

            To your second point, I hear you, but I think in this digital day and age, our privacy is a bit of an illusion. Doesn’t matter if it’s the government or private business, our stuff is just all out there for anyone dedicated enough to get it. I don’t like it, it’s not ideal, I’m not advocating it, but raging against that particular machine seems fruitless as a general principle. I mean, if you or I were to run for Senator, that’s a whole ‘nother kettle of fish in terms of lowered expectations of privacy, but for regular old citizens, it is what it is, facelift or no facelift.

            On the first, I get and accept your distinction, but I was simply pointing out that government currently incentivizes through legislation and the tax code, and the incentives influence personal behavior, and we’re constantly shaping it and reshaping it to serve the country’s interests already. I’m not an economist, but I know what I’d do with either a tax credit OR a better deal on health insurance – invest it my business. (Of course, if I got the tax credit and the health insurance deal was the same, I’d probably just give the money to a heath insurance company for a better plan…not sure that’s ideal either.) Would you be cool if new first-time entrepreneurs got a $1500 tax credit specifically towards individual health insurance purposes? By your logic, that wouldn’t technically be “forcing you to pay” for the choice, would it? Or would it, due to lost government revenue and the resulting increased deficit assuming that government wouldn’t shrink along with the lost revenue (something we could both agree is unlikely to happen)? Or could such a tax credit grow small business enough to pay for itself (I don’t think so, but you never know)?

            In the end of the day, I guess I’m saying that our personal choices, as well as the government’s policies, *already* have a collective impact on each other in ways not always as cut and dried as “I don’t want to pay for your “x”, and they merit discussion. And I think government does have a role to play in the question of how best to create conditions best suited for economic dynamism, and the application of that is surely where we part ways.

            G’night, and thanks for the discussion.

          • acat

            and I know I’m jumping in here…

            that the Obamacare plan *is* the law of the land, mandate and employer-crushing fines included.

            There’s no more point in debating what we’d like to change about it, it’s the law, and it’s an immoral one at that.

            The “cash for clunkers” program was equally immoral. I replaced my ride a year before “cash for clunkers” started. Did I get a retroactive break? No. Do I still have to pay the taxes for other people to get a “credit”? Yes. If a business did that, it’d be theft and there’d be a perp walk.

            Obamacare does *precisely* the same thing – if you’re breathing, you must be covered, and if you don’t provide your own coverage, like that court-appointed-attorney Miranda mentions, coverage will be provided for you. Out of *my* pocket.

            Not sure what your answer is but mine is to minimize my income…

            Mew

  • jazzycmk

    I’m going to quit my job to start a conservative think tank so we can run morons like Pelosi out of office.

    That probably wouldn’t be considered “artistic” enough. There’s probably a provision in the health care bill that get me fined for doing something like that.

    Does it ever strike her that if people ever took her up on her lunacy and quit their jobs en masse that there wouldn’t be enough working stiffs to pay taxes and fund her pet programs?

    Grrrrrrrrrrrr

  • inde_artist

    Yes, I have health insurance which I pay for and no, I’m not interested in sucking off the government teat. Nancy doesn’t mention whether these aspiring artists will be residing at her place or not. One can only hope…

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