U.S. politics isolation tank

[teknight]

The idea that receiving unemployment benefits encourages people to not look for paying work has been put forward by numerous politicians and pundits from the right in their arguments against extending unemployment benefits. Since unemployment pays a whopping $200 or so per week, I'm very very skeptical. That's about what my young son makes working at a local hardware store and it's nowhere near enough to live on anywhere near a city. Particularly if there's anything of a family to support.

I don't think the dollars available through unemployment insurance are high enough to provide any kind of incentive to stay on unemployment. At the same time, the ratio between the number of people who are unemployed and the number of available jobs right now makes it impossible to test the assertion.

Thoughts?

Told you I'd feel like an asshole-and that post doesn't even look written in English...Ooops.
Here is a Kansas Fed published article on the structure of jobs in the US. It appears to be somewhat dated, but it frames the discussion well, I think (go to pages 61 ---Distribution of US Employment- and 65 -industries projected to add and shed jobs the fastest).
Or go here , for more recent BLS data on the largest occupations.

I'd read that second link as: there is a lot of competition for some of these jobs, as they are low skilled (not all of them, obviously), and, in a down economy, there will be even fewer jobs (hence more competition). This might make the unemployment benefits more attractive, especially given a lack of options.

Gimme a couple of minutes, and I'll try to give myself a rebuttal.

 

[intothewoods]

In a few weeks she can spend her days fucking her cunt with a dildo while the adults take over.

Yeah, leave the cunt fucking to the kids while the adults...wait a minute.

 

[teknight]

I'll let Newsweek and the Fed handle my rebuttal

Do Jobless Benefits Raise Unemployment?

Conclusion:

The bottom line: Although the Obama-GOP tax deal extends unemployment benefits, it probably will not dissuade many jobless from seeking work.

 

[midwestyankee]

Do Jobless Benefits Raise Unemployment?

Conclusion:

The bottom line: Although the Obama-GOP tax deal extends unemployment benefits, it probably will not dissuade many jobless from seeking work.

It's entirely possible that someone who can cook up a squirrel in his popcorn fryer might be able to live on $200/week and thus have lowered motivation to seek employment. Seems to me that outside of rural areas where costs are low and folks can be somewhat self-sufficient by growing/hunting their own food, the take from unemployment is just too damned low to be a disincentive. Further, for many people receiving unemployment compensation carries a powerful stigma. I can't imagine going down to an office to stand in line to get an unemployment check. There was a time many years ago when I was eligible for such benefits but my pride kept me from applying. I doubt if I'm alone in that regard.

 

[teknight]

Do Jobless Benefits Raise Unemployment?

Conclusion:

It's entirely possible that someone who can cook up a squirrel in his popcorn fryer might be able to live on $200/week and thus have lowered motivation to seek employment. Seems to me that outside of rural areas where costs are low and folks can be somewhat self-sufficient by growing/hunting their own food, the take from unemployment is just too damned low to be a disincentive. Further, for many people receiving unemployment compensation carries a powerful stigma. I can't imagine going down to an office to stand in line to get an unemployment check. There was a time many years ago when I was eligible for such benefits but my pride kept me from applying. I doubt if I'm alone in that regard.

You most likely are not, but, at the same time, no offense, that's a singular viewpoint. Why the hell am I bashing poor people?

 

[midwestyankee]

You most likely are not, but, at the same time, no offense, that's a singular viewpoint. Why the hell am I bashing poor people?

I doubt if your intent is to bash poor people but rather you are caught up in seeing the problem from solely an analytical-by-the-numbers perspective. I sense that there are numbers out there that may well support my view, but my view is all about human nature and not about any numbers corraled by a Macroeconomics ABD in some cubicle three levels beneath the library stacks.

 

[rosco rathbone]

Hitchens on baggers

So, Beck’s “9/12 Project” is canalizing old racist and clerical toxic-waste material that a healthy society had mostly flushed out of its system more than a generation ago, and injecting it right back in again. Things that had hidden under stones are being dug up and re-released. And why? So as to teach us anew about the dangers of “spending and deficits”? It’s enough to make a cat laugh. No, a whole new audience has been created, including many impressionable young people, for ideas that are viciously anti-democratic and ahistorical. The full effect of this will be felt farther down the road, where we will need it even less.

 

[WriterDom]

Do Jobless Benefits Raise Unemployment?

Conclusion:

It's entirely possible that someone who can cook up a squirrel in his popcorn fryer might be able to live on $200/week and thus have lowered motivation to seek employment. Seems to me that outside of rural areas where costs are low and folks can be somewhat self-sufficient by growing/hunting their own food, the take from unemployment is just too damned low to be a disincentive. Further, for many people receiving unemployment compensation carries a powerful stigma. I can't imagine going down to an office to stand in line to get an unemployment check. There was a time many years ago when I was eligible for such benefits but my pride kept me from applying. I doubt if I'm alone in that regard.

It's 330 a week in Georgia. In Massachusetts you can get half your work wage up to 629 a week. That's receiving 629 a week.

You might be too proud to take it but you'd probably be too proud to live in government housing and it's in every hamlet in America.

It's hard to say when do you cut them off. 99 weeks? Do you let them draw ten years? Twenty years? If they are twenty do they draw until SS kicks in at 65?

 

[midwestyankee]

Hitchens on baggers

Another choice segment:

"Millions of Americans are currently worried about two things that are, in their minds, emotionally related. The first of these is the prospect that white people will no longer be the majority in this country, and the second is that the United States will be just one among many world powers. This is by no means purely a “racial” matter. (In my experience, black Americans are quite concerned that “Hispanic” immigration will relegate them, too.) Having an honest and open discussion about all this is not just a high priority. It’s more like a matter of social and political survival. But the Beck-Skousen faction want to make such a debate impossible. They need and want to sublimate the anxiety into hysteria and paranoia. The president is a Kenyan. The president is a secret Muslim. The president (why not?—after all, every little bit helps) is the unacknowledged love child of Malcolm X. And this is their response to the election of an extremely moderate half-African American candidate, who speaks better English than most and who has a model family. Revolted by this development, huge numbers of white people choose to demonstrate their independence and superiority by putting themselves eagerly at the disposal of a tear-stained semi-literate shock jock, and by repeating his list of lies and defamations. But, of course, there’s nothing racial in their attitude …"

 

[midwestyankee]

It's 330 a week in Georgia. In Massachusetts you can get half your work wage up to 629 a week. That's receiving 629 a week.

You might be too proud to take it but you'd probably be too proud to live in government housing and it's in every hamlet in America.

It's hard to say when do you cut them off. 99 weeks? Do you let them draw ten years? Twenty years? If they are twenty do they draw until SS kicks in at 65?

I'm a little surprised at the numbers you give, but I'll take your word for it.

As for cutting it all off, it's a monster leap of imagination to think that as the economy continues to improve - and it will eventually - there will be much stomach to fight for extending the benefits more than one other time when they expire in a bit over a year. But I suppose if you believe that Obama is really the secret love-child of an alien and Malcolm X, then you'll buy almost any nutty thing about the government.

 

[WriterDom]

I'm a little surprised at the numbers you give, but I'll take your word for it.

As for cutting it all off, it's a monster leap of imagination to think that as the economy continues to improve - and it will eventually - there will be much stomach to fight for extending the benefits more than one other time when they expire in a bit over a year. But I suppose if you believe that Obama is really the secret love-child of an alien and Malcolm X, then you'll buy almost any nutty thing about the government.

I don't know that things will get better. In the short run perhaps but this time next year we could be in much worse shape that we are now and I was a person who always believed these downturns were in a sense, necessary and recoverable. And that's strictly a nonpolitical observation. I hope for the best.

 

[Netzach]

They learned from the early Clinton administration that you can't get everything you want at once. You have to go in steps. The democrats lost 54 House seats in 1994. Do you want to see that happen again Netzach?

So their best thinking got us RomneyCare. Buy insurance or go to the Gulag.

It's true. Dismantling welfare was just the start onto the road of dismantling everything that benefits the poor, which will soon be 90 percent of us! Yay!

 

[Netzach]

Moving a discussion over here from another thread where it began.

This chart shows some remarkable differentials. Not only do better educated people vote at a much higher rate than those with only a high school diploma or less, they also are much less affected by unemployment in the current recession.

Tek had this to say about the chart:




The idea that receiving unemployment benefits encourages people to not look for paying work has been put forward by numerous politicians and pundits from the right in their arguments against extending unemployment benefits. Since unemployment pays a whopping $200 or so per week, I'm very very skeptical. That's about what my young son makes working at a local hardware store and it's nowhere near enough to live on anywhere near a city. Particularly if there's anything of a family to support.

I don't think the dollars available through unemployment insurance are high enough to provide any kind of incentive to stay on unemployment. At the same time, the ratio between the number of people who are unemployed and the number of available jobs right now makes it impossible to test the assertion.

Thoughts?

I dunno where the 200 comes from - here it's based on wages and some proportion of wages up to a point - so it's possible to exist, but not happily. WD's figures actually jive with my experience with and near it.

No one wants to just sit on their ass and wait for it to end. If you have a phone and a house to heat, you're looking at not much else going for you.

No one's proposing 20 years of benefits, WD, don't be obtuse. It takes about 1-2 years in some cases to find a job that has medical benefits for your family. The only people who can do the "deliver pizza and work 2 retail jobs" lifestyle have no health worries and no children.

 

[teknight]

So their best thinking got us RomneyCare. Buy insurance or go to the Gulag.

I'm curious: do you actually believe this administration will send people to a gulag?

 

[rosco rathbone]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-k-black/what-aspect-of-dealing-wi_b_793707.html

 

[JMohegan]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-k-black/what-aspect-of-dealing-wi_b_793707.html

http://www.thenation.com/article/156953/obamas-sell-out-taxes-not-so-fast

 

[JMohegan]

I'm curious: do you actually believe this administration will send people to a gulag?

Don't mind him. He's got a penchant for hyperbole under any circumstances, but since the November elections has been feelin' super sassy.

 

[teknight]

Don't mind him. He's got a penchant for hyperbole under any circumstances, but since the November elections has been feelin' super sassy.

OK then. I just wonder how many do believe the hyperbolic talk...

 

[JMohegan]

OK then. I just wonder how many do believe the hyperbolic talk...

WD and I agree on very little in political discussions, and he's got a maddening habit of absorbing and regurgitating the Fox party line without any fact-checking whatsoever, but I honestly don't think he is stupid or wildly paranoid.

 

[teknight]

Since I don't know him, I'm not saying either thing about him, which is why I asked him. I'm asking about people at large 'cause those sorts of statements do get made...and they are made by a very vocal bunch, so they seem to permeate all the arguments, by virtue of being said loudly. So:
- are people sheep, just repeating what Fox dictates?
- are there those that believe this sort of stuff? Not many (I hope).
Neither variant bodes well for democracy, if you ask me...

 

[Netzach]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-k-black/what-aspect-of-dealing-wi_b_793707.html

The problem is when you get paid by the people taking everyone else's lunch money it becomes hard to sock 'em in the face just once hard.

 

[WriterDom]

I'm curious: do you actually believe this administration will send people to a gulag?

You people don't repeat the party line? Honestly, I don't hear much original thinking here. Not from liberal blog link of the day, Roscoe. With the possible exception of Netzach in those moments she gets off the cuff and takes off her liberal lens.

No, I meant gulag as an expression. As in we, the federal government, command you to buy health insurance or we'll come up with some way to spank your ass if you resist. I'm not sure that's constitutional. It might fall over state power but I know how you people love the federal government and think they can do no wrong.

 

[teknight]

You people don't repeat the party line? Honestly, I don't hear much original thinking here. Not from liberal blog link of the day, Roscoe. With the possible exception of Netzach in those moments she gets off the cuff and takes off her liberal lens.

No, I meant gulag as an expression. As in we, the federal government, command you to buy health insurance or we'll come up with some way to spank your ass if you resist. I'm not sure that's constitutional. It might fall over state power but I know how you people love the federal government and think they can do no wrong.

You people? Who? Romanians?!

 

[midwestyankee]

You people? Who? Romanians?!

In WD's world, everyone who questions him or does not agree with him is a librul agent of Satan. Even Romanians.

 

[teknight]

I've never said Romanians weren't librul agents of Satan, mind you...

But, you know, Soviet Russia killing millions....vs Americans having mandatory health insurance...they're one and the same thing. Exactly.