Jobs, Unemployment, Firings

Yesterday, Digby hit on one of my favorite talking head idiocies about how folks collecting Unemployment Compensation are just lazy bums getting a free ride vacation. I like to call this the "Larry Kudlow School of Economics" since I've heard Kudlow spout this piece of uninformed gibberish multiple times over the years.

This post by Digby was brought about by Congress's dithering once again on passing a further extension of Unemployment Benefits, currently set to expire on June 2.

Yeah, these tens of millions of our fellow citizens are just a bunch of lazy asses who are living it up on 300 a week. There's plenty of jobs, these people just refuse to work because they like all this cushy free money.

I just don't know what to say about this. You have a 10% official unemployment rate which doesn't count all those who never qualified (small business owners, independent contractors etc.) and it doesn't count all those who have already fallen off the rolls. And yet politicians are buying this nonsense that there are plenty of jobs but people just won't work? That's completely ridiculous. These people should be ashamed of themselves.

This article is from 2/2009 and shows the maximum weekly Unemployment Benefit for each state. The payments range from $230 per week for Mississippi and $240 for Arizona (lowest two states) up to $628 for Massachusetts and $584 for New Jersey (the two highest). California pays a maximum of $450 and New York maxes at $405.

But it's not just the non-existent jobs. From yesterday's NY Times, we have the story on cutbacks to Child Care subsidies. More exercises in penny wise, pound foolish operations.

Despite a substantial increase in federal support for subsidized child care, which has enabled some states to stave off cuts, others have trimmed support, and most have failed to keep pace with rising demand, according to poverty experts and federal officials.

That has left swelling numbers of low-income families struggling to reconcile the demands of work and parenting, just as they confront one of the toughest job markets in decades.

This is the downside for most all of the various legislation passed by Congress that provides "subsidies" for poor individuals. We'll most likely see it with the subsidies from the Health Insurance Reform. In order to achieve some faux "bi-partisan" ideal against deficit spending, it is always the poor and least able who bear the brunt of these actions. Never shall it pass that taxes are raised for those who have the most of course. After all, only the poor people who actually need support are worthy of sacrificing.

We're not looking for hand outs. We're looking for the little bit of support to help us make it together as a society.

And because I can: