Tell Jeb Bush How Many Hours You Already Work

Since I seem to have designated myself the Official Billfold Political Correspondent, I’m going to keep on going with various 2016 Election Updates that are relevant to our interests. For example! Republican candidate Jeb Bush raised more money than anyone else and he’s done it super fast:

Jeb Bush’s presidential campaign raised more money faster than any other campaign, according to new fundraising figures released by the Republican.

In just 16 days of the latest quarter, Bush raised $11.4 million, or an average of $714,000 a day, easily topping his nearest competitor, Hillary Clinton, who raised an average of $562,000 a day.

Good for Jeb! That is an impressive haul. An admiring Politico profile calls him “the $100 million man” and points out, “the super PAC’s haul is unprecedented in American politics.”

You know what’s not unprecedented in American politics, though? A frontrunner putting his foot very far into his mouth when talking about the working man. This week, Jeb basically deep-throated his foot with a suggestion that Americans should “work longer hours.”

While campaigning Wednesday in New Hampshire, Jeb Bush described his plan to grow the economy to a local newspaper, stating that “people need to work longer hours.” ABC reported that the comment, provoked by a question about tax reform, took place during a live streamed interview.

Bush told reporters that his vision for a more productive economy would require workplace participation to “rise from its all-time modern lows.”

Jonathan Chait analyzed:

In economic terms, productivity means output per hours worked. That is a crucial concept for economists, because, over the long run, higher productivity is the only way a society can actually increase its standard of living. You can increase your societal wealth by increasing the amount of hours worked, up to a point, but there are only so many hours in the day. Americans enjoy higher levels of prosperity today than we did a century ago because we produce far more in the hours that we work. In his second sentence, and possibly his first as well (its meaning is more ambiguous), Bush uses productivity to mean producing more by working more — people need to work longer hours and, through their productivity, gain more income.

This casual slip in usage reveals an important assumption. Bush not only prefers higher productivity in its technical meaning (higher output per hours of work), which both conservative and liberal economists consider axiomatic; he likewise considers higher levels of work implicitly preferable. Liberals do not share that assumption. And the division over this question turns out to be buried within many of the economic fights of our time.

Democratic challenger Hillary Clinton pounced:

I got annoyed because I am an English language dork, and to my mind, you can’t work “longer” hours, because an hour is a standard goddamned length, you know? Sixty minutes, like it or not. Of course, certain hours can feel longer, like when you’re trapped with smug politicians speaking in soundbytes, or you’re at the end of a shift that’s already gone from sun up to sun down. That’s relativity. Right? (I never took physics.)

Anyway, I know what the man means, and it’s not that he thinks “Americans aren’t work hard enough,” though that’s giving the ball a good spin, Team Hillary. It’s that he wants us to work more. The trouble is, we already do work more. We work ’til we drop, then we get up and work again. Many of us don’t get any vacation and the rest of us barely take vacation. We’re nuts for work in this country. We love it in a messed up Stockholm Syndrome-y, “Thank you sir may I have another?” kind of way.

Those of us who don’t work 40 hours a week or more, who piece together flimsy part-time jobs, usually do so out of necessity, not because we think it would be fun to support a family by going freelance without either security or benefits.

Here’s Chait again, with the data:

Americans work many more hours than French workers, or workers anywhere in the advanced world except South Korea and Japan. Conservatives embrace that distinction, and seek to extend it further still.

Maybe Jeb honestly doesn’t know that. He’s a multi-millionaire former governor from an wealthy and elite family of presidents: not exactly a man of the people. Maybe he needs to be educated. Maybe he’d find it really helpful if everyone wrote their name, their age, and how many hours they work a week on a postcard and mailed it to his campaign headquarters.

The last word on this belongs to techies:

It never helps to work more. Technology helps us work better. In terms of workforce productivity, we need to figure out how to get more done in less time — and this applies to every job and every person. It crosses the political divide.

Amen.

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