RUSH: National Review Online, Noah Glyn. Headline: “Study: Extending Unemployment Benefits Increased Unemployment by More than 3 Percentage Points.”
This is a pull quote: “By continuously extending unemployment benefits, the authors calculate, the federal government has increased unemployment by 3.6 percentage points. As explained, this is because extensions of unemployment benefits discourage workers from accepting lower-wage jobs and cause employers to create fewer jobs.” This makes, again, perfect common sense.
If you’re gonna pay people not to work, and if you’re going to pay them enough not to work that they can eat and have phones and drive around and have big screens, it is gonna be tough to get them to accept jobs that are not up to snuff. Another pull quote: “The study’s finding: ‘Most of the persistent increase in unemployment during the Great Recession [i.e., the Obama years] can be accounted for by the unprecedented extensions of unemployment benefit eligibility.'”
Folks, this is only common sense. Now, the left wants you to believe this is nothing more than a compassion issue, and that’s how they’ve been approaching this latest proposed extension of three months. “How can you not care about these people? This is horrible,” and then they come out and lie to us as Obama did. “Unemployment benefits create jobs! Unemployment checks create jobs! Unemployment checks grow the economy!”
If that’s the case, why not just put everybody on unemployment and get employment down to zero? By the way, here’s another thing. The unemployment rate’s down to 6.7%, right? And everybody now acknowledges that has been accomplished because we don’t count the people who are no longer looking for work. My idea: Every one of you looking for work stop and we’ll get the unemployment rate down to zero.
Well, do the math. It freaking works. If everybody quits looking for work, by definition, they’re not counted, so the unemployment rate is zero. Obama can say his policies have resulted in a 0% “unemployment rate,” not to be confused with how many people are working. Anyway, it’s extensive study, and the details are at National Review Online, a story by Noah Glyn.
But again, this is just common sense. You pay people not to work and you’re gonna create unemployment. Pay people not to work, and keep paying them and keep paying them for over 99 or a hundred weeks, and you’re gonna lose jobs. People are gonna be less inclined to go back to work. Why should they? In some cases. Pure common sense.