If it is about "incentivizing people to work" and getting warm butts in chairs or out swinging hammers... well, how are we going to compete with a country that has 4x the number of warm bodies?

We can't compete with China via the number of people we have working.

We need to build a functioning society instead of a group of rugged individual capitalists who only come together when we need to help out the wealthy with a bail out or tax break.