Issues

The need for federal unemployment benefits persists

What would the Republican members of the U.S. House of Representatives do if they were forced to live on unemployment insurance and food stamps for six months? And how would they feel if their food stamp allotments were suddenly reduced and their unemployment checks cut off — three days after Christmas?…

The program, called Emergency Unemployment Compensation, was approved by Congress during the Great Recession to extend state-based unemployment insurance programs by using federal dollars to pay benefits to people looking for jobs. Congress has previously extended the program several times.

Unemployment in the United States was under 6 percent before the recession but the national average remains stuck above 7 percent — lower than the 10 percent peak in 2009 but still troublesome — and there are nearly three unemployed workers for every job opening. A report by the White House Council on Economic Advisers and the U.S. Labor Department, released Thursday, said extending the EUC one year would save 240,000 jobs nationwide, including 3,829 jobs in Oregon…

The Eugene Register Guard, December 9, 2014

Our Response & Leave Your Comments

The RG editors didn’t read or chose to ignore a simple economics lesson from an earlier issue of Lane Solutions.

So as much as we hate to repeat ourselves, we’ll count to ten and try again to communicate basic logic and common sense to them.

Here it is: politicians cannot remove money (“taxes”) from the private sector, take a bite out of it to run their beaurocracy, give what’s left to a group they want to vote for them and create more jobs than they first killed by over taxation and more money than they grabbed from the poor saps who worked for it.

If paying people not to work actually creates more jobs and economic growth why don’t we just pay everyone not to work?

And what do these geniuses think we’d do with the money if they didn’t grab it? Bury it? No – we’d invest it or spend it. In either case it would end up back in the economy in the form of economic growth and job creation.

Why don’t these “public servants” concentrate on something where they’re more likely to stumble on

success? Like an anti-gravity machine or a pill that converts water to gasoline.