Oh, Come On!

I told you I would be using this pic a lot.

So, my morning routine involves waking up to an alarm on my iPhone and reading my emails and the NY Times homepage in bed.  (I don't HATE Steve Jobs.)

I awoke to this piece of "reporting".  They find a bunch of guys who have philosophical qualms about accepting unemployment insurance.  The spokesman for this point of view is a conservative political thinker who wants to replace the income tax with a sales tax.  Needless to say, all those who want to end UI are from Texas, and needless to say, they almost all take the UI checks anyway.

They throw in this quote for "balance":

“If you would have asked me five years ago, I would have said no, because I always considered myself a Republican,” said Ms. Gorski, 50. “But now being in this position, with a college education and lots of work experience behind me, I find myself swinging more liberal, and more Democrat. And that would never have happened before.”

That reminds me of the old joke about a Democrat being a Republican who lost just lost his job.

There is also some wanking about whether or not UI benefits dissuade people from looking for jobs.  Yes, in a situation of nearly full employment, I could see how getting a check might keep some people at home.  But with chronic high unemployment if someone is not looking for a job because of UI, there are ten people who WILL take that job.  You can argue about the moral failings of that individual, but you can't fault the system that keeps literally millions of people out of poverty, keeps families in their homes and keeps at least a meager demand flowing through the system.

Do you want to know what the potential power of Occupy Wall Street is?  It's in fighting this BS treatment of economic need by power elites and that includes "even the liberal" New York Times.

I'm glad that some conservative middle class guy in Texas doesn't like UI but cashes the checks anyway.  It's interesting that there is a minority of people in UI who don't like the system, precisely because it functions as it is designed to.

But it's freaking irrelevant, too.

Still, in the cold calculus of political expediency, I hope those mouth breathing idiots in the GOP adopt this Dickensian sense of unemployment insurance.  I'd like to see them throw millions of people into poverty.  I'd like to see the backlash THAT creates.

You want to rail against all forms of government spending?  Own the consequences.