This (via Instapundit) is interesting:

Garthwaite et al. analyzed what happened in 2005, when the state of Tennessee discontinued Medicare health insurance coverage for about 4% of its non-elderly adult population, many of them nondisabled low-income adults without children at home. With a new need for private health insurance, which is often provided by employers, many of these people found new jobs. State employment rose by 6 percentage points from 2004 to 2006. This change mirrors the Congressional Budget Office projections of the decline in employment due to the expansion of public health insurance mandated in the U.S. Affordable Care Act.

Unfortunately, public schools have failed to educate generations of Americans not just about economics, but about critical thinking.  Meanwhile, progressive deconstruction has undermined the more social means by which people learn how to think outside of the classroom.

The REMI model that the state used to promote dismissive projections for large changes to the sales tax is built on very similar, dehumanizing assumptions about how Rhode Islanders would react to changes in policies.  If, for example, a reduction in revenue were to cost highly educated, well paid state employees their jobs, REMI assumes that they’d either leave the state or take much less money in one of the newly created retail jobs — not that they’d find similar jobs in the private sector or even create similar jobs by starting their own businesses.  If (for some inexplicable reason) lawmakers didn’t address the revenue shortfall by removing the many government spending extravagances, and instead cut across the board, then REMI assumes people who would have received subsidized heart surgery and the like would simply go without it — harming the “economically impactful” healthcare industry.

In other words, the government would adjust its spending to mitigate harm to Rhode Islanders, and Rhode Islanders wouldn’t adjust their spending to save their own lives.

At some level of the lefty hierarchy, the people promoting progressive policies must realize what they’re doing, which means they want to further a cycle of dependence on government.  Unemployment and human suffering are just temporary necessities to push people to the total dependence on government that is the only true route to nirvana.