“For some, jobless benefits trump a job”
StandUpForHumanity links to an article titled Work sometimes pays less than benefits in such a weak job market by Allison Lynn, and submitted the following commentary, which I’m going to try to interrupt as few times as possible…
With the incentive to work and produce vanishing from society, it’s getting to be that people simply don’t even see the need to work. Why would you work 8 hours a day when the government will send you a check and take care of everything for you? People are passing off responsibility for their lives to the easiest target.
Hold on a second. It’s me again, Squashed. I know I won’t be able to convince anybody to do my writing for me with submissions if I but in and interrupt all the time—but it’s important that everybody has a full set of facts. As you might imagine, unemployment benefits, like work, aren’t constant. They’re tied to how much you previously made. If you made $30/hr as a skilled laborer, your benefits would be a whole lot higher than they would be if you made $7.50/hr flipping burgers. If your fixed expenses anticipate an income of $1,000/week, you’ll need more to bridge the time between jobs than you would if your previous fixed expenses were $300/week. As a basic principle, if you’re falling from a higher platform, it takes a bigger cushion to break your fall.
The skilled laborer on unemployment might be bringing home more than the guy flipping burgers. And, since flipping burgers isn’t going to pay the skilled laborer’s bills, it’s not totally unreasonable that he might want to hold out for a higher paying job. If we had a shortage of burger flippers, we might want to reconsider the incentives—but unemployment is too high everywhere.
It is not the government’s job to feed you or provide you with shelter, health care, etc. The purpose of the government is simply to protect your rights. It is your own responsibility to take care of yourself - sink or swim. The right to the pursuit of happiness does not mean the government is supposed to make you happy. The right to life doesn’t mean the government has to keep you alive.
If you aren’t working, what exactly are you doing? Watching “The Hills” and “Jersey Shore”? Waiting for Obama to pay your bills? You don’t have to love your job in order to do it, but the simple fact is that you have to work. You have to work in order to make money to live in this world (the true purpose and meaning of money has been distorted and perverted as well, but that’s another discussion altogether). One of the problems is that these leeches and looters on unemployment aren’t looking for a job, they’re looking for a particular job. Woe is me, the world isn’t perfect, but you’re childish and naive for believing that everything is just going to work itself out.
(It’s me again. Sorry to interrupt, but, dude, enough with this “the unemployed are “leeches and looters” business. To collect unemployment, you must document that you are actively looking for work. The jobs simply aren’t there. If one guy on unemployment takes a lower-paying job, it just means there’s one less job for somebody else to take. We’re really not in an overemployment where we need to encourage more people to get into the job market. The market is saturated as it is.
However, you are right that it is childish and naive to believe that everything is just going to work itself out. Yet you don’t sound like you’d support the systemic intervention necessary to get the economy going.
Humanity is capable of so much and throughout all of time people have worked in order to achieve their full potential - look at the New York skyline, look at the unbelievable advancements of the Industrial Revolution, look at science and engineering - the human mind is infinite. Why, in general, are we now satisfied with lethargy, apathy and complacence? To work is to prove the greatness of human potential.
Business owners having to pay an unemployment tax to pay for the people sitting on their asses prevents them from being able to hire new workers who are willing and able to do a job. This means that that business cannot expand or prosper because there is someone at home under the impression that the world is going to take care of them, that the world owes itself to them. This stagnant state of immoral inactivity will only snowball until people are happy with nothing, living on government food rations and sub-par medical treatment, tricked into accepting the “ideal conditions” for the working class that the globalist socialists claim to be creating.
Boredom, ignorance and obliviousness do not create true happiness. Settling for mediocrity is not something to strive for. This state is equivalent to the drug-induced stupor of the homeless junky begging for change by the highway downtown. Is this what you want out of life?
That’s the end of OhTheHumanity’s thoughts. If I may summarize:
- The unemployed aren’t doing a very good job of magically creating jobs.
- Maybe if we take away their unemployment benefits they will harness the infinite power of the human mind to magically create jobs.
- Actually, let’s take away unemployment benefits and say mean things. If you only kick people when they’re down, it’s hard for them to kick you back.
- Surely eliminating unemployment benefits and the subsequent drop in consumption couldn’t have any unintended effects.
OhTheHumanity’s underlying point that prolonged unemployment benefits reduce the incentive to seek work. But we’re not in a spot where anybody needs a bigger incentive to look for work. There aren’t enough jobs to go along. At this point, our efforts to reduce unemployment need to ways to create more jobs. Once we start have trouble finding workers, we can talk about the problem with unemployment compensation.
