Tea Party: People on unemployment benefits are lazy / Study: People on unemployment find work faster

[ck4829]

Who to believe, the same crowd that calls Obama a Muslim Commie Nazi who was born in Kenya and have absolutely no evidence to back up their claims that the unemployed are lazy or a bunch of eggheads who use liberally biased things like math and the scientific method? Hmmm. Tough decision.

Tea Party Rep. Steve King (R-IA) took to the House floor yesterday to give a diatribe against large swaths of of the social safety net, from food stamps to heating fuel subsidies, but reserved particular disdain for unemployment insurance, which he dismissed as “welfare for people that won’t work.”

The former speaker of the House, Speaker Pelosi, has consistently said that unemployment checks are one of those reliable and immediate forms of economy recovery. <...> The 80 million Americans that are of working age but are simply not in the workforce need to be put to work. We can’t have a nation of slackers and then have me have to sit in the Judiciary Committee listening to them argue that there’s work that Americans won’t do, so we have to import people to do the work that Americans won’t do, and borrow money to pay the welfare for people that won’t work. That is a foolish thing for a nation to do. We’ve gotta get this country back to work and get those people out of the slacker rolls and onto the employed rolls.

http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/09/16/321373/steve-king-unemployed-slackers/

This claim has also been echoed by Senator Rand Paul, Rep. Blake Farenthold, and by John Lott in an editorial on the Fox News website.

But what is the reality?

The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco has this:

Figure 2 displays the resulting unemployment duration series for job losers and leavers/entrants from 2005 through the end of 2009. The vertical lines identify the start of the recession and the dates for the initiation and renewal of the extended UI benefits programs. Unemployment duration rose slightly in the early phase of the recession and then increased sharply after extended UI benefits became available, reaching a high of about 35 weeks in mid-2009 before declining back to about 30 weeks by the end of the year. Notably, the increase in expected duration was similar for job losers, the group that is eligible for UI benefits, and leavers and entrants, who are ineligible.

The similar increase in duration for the UI eligible and ineligible groups suggests that extended UI had only a limited impact on unemployment duration. As of the fourth quarter of 2009, the expected duration of unemployment had risen about 18.7 weeks for job losers and about 17.1 weeks for leavers and entrants, using the years 2006-2007 as a baseline. The differential increase of 1.6 weeks for job losers is the presumed impact of extended UI benefits on unemployment duration. It is straightforward to translate this increase in unemployment duration into an effect on the unemployment rate, based on their proportional relationship and adjusted for the share of job losers in overall unemployment, which was about 67% in December 2009. The implied increase in the unemployment rate is quite small, slightly less than 0.4 percentage point, indicating that without UI extensions, the measured unemployment rate would have been 9.6% in December 2009 rather than the observed 10.0%.



http://www.frbsf.org/publications/economics/letter/2010/el2010-12.html

The red line is people who are on unemployment, the blue line is people who are not on it. People on unemployment insurance usually find work faster than people on it, and even when they don't find work faster, the difference isn't by much. Why this is not told to us by the 'liberal' media is beyond me. Oh wait...

[sam11111]

1. JOB SHORTAGE is tallied by Bureau of Labor Statistics. Few jobs, many jobless

Number of job openings ARE counted by the BLS.

Compare that small # with the # of jobless.

The FOX lie is centuries old and is totally refuted by this stat,

but many LW activists still need to learn this stat and use it on the RW types.

Blame for unemployment is with the Corporate economy.
Never have been eno jobs nationwide. Never.

WPA could end ALL unemployent in 4 months.. end it .... FOREVER.

There should always be a SURPLUS of jobs. Easy to do.

WPA. Easy.

Sweden kept unemp. low.. usually under one % all 30 yrs of Golden Age.. till the RW lied their way into power about 1991 - just like they did here 1980.

See my sig below for BLS stats I referred to.

[Fantastic Anarchist]

2. Awesome post!

Thanks for sharing. :hi: