I paged back about 10 pages and saw what invariably I knew I'd see...some bullshit about how lazy minorities are breaking the back of the government.
Living in Alabama, one of the amazing bits of rhetoric I get to hear over and over is "I'm payin' for all these laze abouts to just sit there and not work." The corollary is often "If people really wanted a job, they can find one." Really? Seriously? Wow.
With certain legislators axing the extension of unemployment benefits - one of the defenses I've heard has been a retreat to that "lazy bum" drivel.
Let me hit you with something that might seem counter-intuitive: increasing unemployment benefits actually creates jobs.
That's the exact rationale for having automatic stabilizers like unemployment insurance that kick in during these kinds of fiscal downturns. From that CBO report:
Extending additional unemployment benefits would directly help those who would otherwise exhaust their unemployment benefits between March and December of this year. Households receiving unemployment benefits tend to spend the additional benefits quickly, making this option both timely and cost-effective in spurring economic activity and employment. A variant of this option would extend assistance with paying health insurance premiums, which would allow some recipients to maintain health insurance coverage they would otherwise have dropped. This variant would result in increased demand for health care services, and it would increase the income available to purchase other goods and services for recipients who would have purchased insurance even without this special assistance. Both policy options could dampen people’s efforts to look for work, although that concern is less of a factor when employment opportunities are expected to be limited for some time.
CBO estimates that the policies would raise output cumulatively between 2010 and 2015 by $0.70 to $1.90 per dollar of total budgetary cost. CBO also estimates that the policies would add 8 to 19 cumulative years of full-time-equivalent employment in 2010 and 2011 per million dollars of total budgetary cost.
Economies are based on people buying good and services. For example, that's why deficit spending on food stamps during downturns has similar effects to unemployment compensation and for a similar reason. Empirical data shows that every additional $5 spent on them--through emergency spending--spurs up to $9.20 in economic activity. Moreover, as Hanson and Golan conclude in that brief:
Ultimately, whether growth in the Food Stamp Program stimulates economic activity depends on the funding mechanism—emergency financing stimulates economic activity in a recession, while budget-neutral financing does not. However, in either scenario, the increase in FSP expenditures raises the budgets of food stamp recipient households, stabilizing recipients’ food consumption and their well-being during economic downturns. Both scenarios also result in increased demand and production in the agriculture and food sectors, stabilizing economic activities in these key rural sectors during downturns in the economy.
Exactly the reason why stimulus (emergency funding) contained a large amount of money for food stamps:
Today, USDA Under Secretary Kevin Concannon marked the one year anniversary of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (AARA) of 2009, also known as the stimulus or recovery package, by announcing that ARRA invested more than $8 billion in local economies to feed the hungry through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly the Food Stamp Program with approximately $830 million more invested each month. In addition, through the Emergency Food Assistance program, States received an additional $150 million to support local food banks, food pantries and soup kitchens.
So extending programs like this during a recession has VALUE.
Here's more evidence in chart form. Red staters...pardon the use of the color Blue.
The attempts to play on stereotypes is class warfare that serves NO ONE. That goes for both sides. Trying to paint a group as lazy and unwilling to work? That's bull. Trying to paint the rich as evil and uncaring. That's bull too.
Come on people. We can be better critical thinkers than these stereotypes.
