Social safety net harmful to economic growth?

If its economic growth you want, you should move to China. But not as an overseas expatriate but as a Foxconn factory worker earning below China's mandated minimum wage and long hours beyond government sanctioned safety limits.<p>Or you can just move here to my country, Singapore, as a lowly paid foreign labourer being exploited in the same manner.<p>The problem I personally have with the majority of right wing ideologues I encounter in my daily life is that they suffer from massive cognitive dissonance and subscribe to various variants of the Horatio Alger myth.<p>They don't really like it when you call upon their logical fallacies and expose the inherent asymmetries and flaws within existing public education, healthcare and pension fund systems. And then they troll me by calling me naive, etc.<p>I find it really amusing.

His argument doesn't make sense. Personal savings don't get reinvested in capital equipment, corporate savings do. Corporate savings are being spent on all-time record CEO paychecks. Companies aren't investing in capital equipment because there is no demand. People are saving, not spending, because there is no safety net and now they have no ballooning home value to buoy their consumer habits. No spending = no economic recovery. A strong safety net won't solve everything, but in this case Greenspun seems to have things exactly backwards.

"Economic growth" for who, is the question. Would you rather live in a country that has a better performing economy in the aggregate even if it means the median (not the mean) citizen is worse off?