As some of you may or may not be aware, I have a rather....unique perspective on this particular issue. But let's get Senator Paul's sedition out of the way first:
Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky on Tuesday fired back at President Barack Obama's aggressive push for extended unemployment benefits, saying that like "most liberals," he makes "big-hearted, small-brained policy statements."
"They can make all these emotional arguments, but their policies haven't worked and unemployment is still a horrific problem in our country," Paul, a Republican, told "The Steve Malzberg Show" on Newsmax TV.
Earlier in the day, Obama ripped Paul's belief that expanding benefits harms the country.
"I have heard the argument that says extending unemployment insurance will somehow hurt the unemployed, because it saps their motivation to get a new job . . . That really sells the American people short," Obama said.
"I can't name a time when I met an American who would rather have an unemployment check than the pride of having a job," the president said.
As you can probably tell, the Kentuckyan got the better of that exchange. In a blowout. Here's why.
First, unlike The One, Senator Paul has objective proof:
"North Carolina reduced their unemployment benefits and their unemployment went from 8.9% to 7.4%. South Carolina did the same thing, reduced their unemployment 3.5 points. Missouri did the same thing, reduced their unemployment benefits, so their unemployment went down 2.5 points," Paul said.
"So, really there is a direct correlation between extending benefits and having more unemployment . . . All of the studies also show that the longer you are unemployed, the less likely you are to get a job.
"So, if an employer looks at somebody who's been unemployed for two months and someone who's been unemployed for two years, the employer almost always, regardless of skills, chooses the [person] that's only been out of work for two months."
Second, look at O's rejoinder. Not only did he cite precisely zero evidence in support of the asserted beneficiality of unemployment benefits from here to eternity, he temporarily usurped the conservative side of the argument and slapped a manipulatively emotive veneer over it to mischaracterize what Senator Paul said.
Game, set, match, Rand.
And I say that as somebody who is currently on unemployment benefits.
Do I need them? Strictly speaking, no, not yet. It would be years before I needed them because I and my family have kept our living standard pretty much where it was in the beginning - low - even as our means have steadily risen over years and years of hard work. I would eventually because, as much as we've been able to save, it isn't enough to span the nineteen years of life expectancy I have left if my former anti-diabetes zealot primary care physician is correct about my having Type II diabetes (which she's not; I was just a big tub o' goo). If my self-diagnosis is correct (and it is; once I lost fifty pounds, my blood sugar went right back to normal, and I kept the weight off), an extra ten years (and counting) can be added to said life expectancy, which is great in one sense, but magnifies the inadequacy of our nest egg in the other.
Regardless, even extended unemployment benefits wouldn't come close to lasting that long. But are they keeping me from working right now? Not at all. My resume is on fifty-three different job boards in my heretofore professional field. I'm shooting out applications like a pez dispenser. The reasons for my continued vocational infirmity and dubious prospects lie elsewhere, including at Barack Obama's clay feet in a macroeconomic sense.
But I can understand the psychological allure of being able to sit at home and know that, for a while, anyway, money is still coming in. And the more acclimated one gets to that, the more appealing welfare, food stamps, etc. become. These things cease to be temporary relief and become a transition to a new "career," if indolence and sloth can be so described without cracking one's irony manifolds. The irony of a conservative commentator collecting unemployment benefits is likewise not lost on me, and serves as a useful inoculation against the aforementioned corrupt temptations.
This is far from the first time I've been out of work. The difference is, in each previous instance of joblessness, I was in an American economy, where new businesses, and jobs along with them, were being created perpetually and at a break-neck pace. My previous two positions were both with entrepreneurial startup companies that would never have existed in the Obamaconomy. New jobs are simply not being created for me, and so many others, to fill, and so we are left to fight over whatever slots already exist. And in my field, at my age, price tag, and particular career niche, I'm at a comparative disadvantage.
So would it be nice if unemployment benefits could go on forever? Sure - in these piss-poor economic circumstances. When one is drowning, it's easy to develop an unhealthy affection for rope. But what one really wants is to get out of the water and back onto the boat. And what I really want is to resume earning my own living. That is what Senator Paul is saying, and the numbers back him up.
Perhaps if Barack Obama hadn't been a perfumed prince his entire life, buoyed along by a recycling tide of other people's money, never once having to worry where his next meal was coming from or how he was going to cover the next month's rent - in short, if he'd ever spent so much as a single day in reality instead of that Church of the Poisoned Mind in which his grey matter has been corrosively marinating for half a century, he would grasp the meaning of "the pride of having a job," and the economic policies that encourage their mass creation, and possess the humility to accept that they'll never come from his dainty digits.
Which makes it so tragic and infuriating that his worthless ass wasn't itself pink-slipped a year ago.
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