Incestuous Narcissism Part 2

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Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. -Old Chinese Proverb.

And these days not only do people get fish, they demand that you catch it for them and/or “the rich” give them their fish because it’s only “fair”.
And if that fish isn’t good enough for them they will throw it back until they get a bigger, better fish that THEY like!
Unemployment insurance prior to the Age of Obama was for 26 weeks. 6 months and was only meant to help you out in between jobs. Not be de-facto welfare.
Or a stimulus, if you remember what Speaker Pelosi said in July 2010:
“Let me say that unemployment insurance… is one of the biggest stimuluses (sic) to our economy. Economists will tell you, this money is spent quickly. It injects demand into the economy, and it’s job creating. It creates jobs faster than almost any other initiative you can name.”
So unemployment is good for everyone! So nearly 10% unemployment is great!
Aren’t you happy? Don’t you have lots of Hope!?
Now it stretch to 2 YEARS or more. Because Democrats have made finding a job so hard they have to cover their own buts by bribing people.
They call it “compassion”. I call it a bribe. Democrats are very good at paternalistic bribes.
The government pays you not to work. You in turn don’t bother looking. And if you aren’t looking you aren’t one of the statistics on Unemployment numbers because you aren’t looking.
Thus, the government can keep it artificially lower than it already is. Which is very high indeed.
So the Unemployment rate is just another political game to be manipulated.
Meanwhile, you have people just sitting around eating Doritos and hanging out doing nothing and getting paid for it!
And the government doesn’t make it easy to get off the dole either. Whether on purpose or not.
In the first year of unemployment, the size of the benefit check is based on your old salary. You can go right back on unemployment after a temp job, and nothing changes. But federal law requires states to recalculate benefits for the second year. If you worked a few days or a few months, the second year’s checks will be based on that lower earnings total. (Hartford Courant)

So you’re on unemployment, you get a temp job, your benefits get cut. So the obvious answer is to not take the temp job, right?
The government makes you want to stay.
But now Ms. Hanson rues the day she took that work. Why? The Connecticut Department of Labor used her negligible earnings in her part-time job as the new baseline for Hanson’s unemployment benefits. She went from receiving $483 a week to getting nothing.
“Afterwards, unofficially, they said I shouldn’t have taken the job,” Hanson says. (CSM)
Incentives to stay unemployed. Incestuous you might ask? At least I would.
Employers and economists point to several explanations. Extending jobless benefits to 99 weeks gives the unemployed less incentive to search out new work. Millions of homeowners are unable to move for a job because the real-estate collapse leaves them owing more on their homes than they are worth.
The job market itself also has changed. During the crisis, companies slashed millions of middle-skill, middle-wage jobs. That has created a glut of people who can’t qualify for highly skilled jobs but have a hard time adjusting to low-pay, unskilled work…
Many of the applicants he (Mark Sperry of Catepillar) saw at job fairs, he says, were just going through the motions so they could collect their unemployment checks. Some workers agree that unemployment benefits make them less likely to take whatever job comes along, particularly when those jobs don’t pay much. Michael Hatchell, a 52-year-old mechanic in Lumberton, N.C., says he turned down more than a dozen offers during the 59 weeks he was unemployed, because they didn’t pay more than the $450 a week he was collecting in benefits.
It is particularly troubling at a time when 4.3% of the labor force has been out of work for more than six months—a level much higher than after any other recession since 1948. (WSJ)
So what are you to do if Unemployment pays better than the job?
Just game the system.
And the system shall provide.
The disconnect between workers and jobs could constrain the economy for some time. It makes it hard for even small firms, which as a group typically account for an outsize share of job growth in a rebound. (WSJ)
So if you have 99 weeks of unemployment, you go out “looking” for a job but not really, then when it gets to about 95 weeks you get serious about it. But that’s nearly 2 years later!
There was a Swedish study that when they cut the benefit time, the amount of time people kept “looking” decreased in proportion.
Alan Krueger, the current Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and a highly respected labor economist has said in his academic writing exactly that: unemployment insurance causes the unemployed to stay unemployed longer.
In his academic studies Dr. Krueger wrote that “more generous unemployment insurance (UI) benefits have been found to be associated with longer spells of unemployment,” and further finds that “the job finding rate jumps up around the time benefits are exhausted. Most importantly, we find that job search intensity is inversely related to UI benefit generosity for those who are eligible for UI.” In other words, a senior Obama administration official finds that less generous UI benefits cause the unemployed to search harder for new work.
Lawrence Summers, Director of the White House’s National Economic Council has said the same:
“government assistance programs contribute to long-term unemployment by providing an incentive, and the means, not to work. Each unemployed person has a ‘reservation wage’—the minimum wage he or she insists on getting before accepting a job. Unemployment insurance and other social assistance programs increase [the] reservation wage, causing an unemployed person to remain unemployed longer.”
“Public policy designed to help workers who lose their jobs can lead to structural unemployment as an unintended side effect. . . . In other countries, particularly in Europe, benefits are more generous and last longer. The drawback to this generosity is that it reduces a worker’s incentive to quickly find a new job.”-Liberal Economist Paul Krugman’s Macroeconomics textbook.
The Same Paul Krugman  recently described Sen. Jon Kyl’s (R-AZ) statement that unemployment insurance causes individuals to stay out of work longer “a bizarre point of view.”(Heritage.org)
More specifically, In the NY Times:  In Mr. Kyl’s view, then, what we really need to worry about right now — with more than five unemployed workers for every job opening, and long-term unemployment at its highest level since the Great Depression — is whether we’re reducing the incentive of the unemployed to find jobs. To me, that’s a bizarre point of view — but then, I don’t live in Mr. Kyl’s universe.
So, like everything with Liberals, it’s all politics.
We, The Democrats, who have the patent on “compassion” will kiss your behind and let you sit on your ass for 2 years. As long as those evil Republicans don’t come in and demand you have some self-respect that is.
Even if they do, the Democrats will trot out their “grandma eating dog food” “they want to cut you off” “they’re heartless” “mean” “Cruel” class warfare hoaries anyhow.
Or as Mr. Krugman put it, “How can the parties agree on policy when they have utterly different visions of how the economy works, when one party feels for the unemployed, while the other weeps over affluent victims of the “death tax”?
Democrats feel your pain (good,sense they are the cause of most of it!). And Republicans are heartless, greedy and obsessed with the kiss up to “the rich”.
Meanwhile, you sit on your behind for up to 2 years eating Doritos and watching Judge Judy.
Who are you going to vote for, the pimp or Mom who says get you lazy ass off the couch?
Unemployment has become a political weapon and a tool, akin to welfare.
You don’t work, we pay you. You vote for us, we keep paying you.
Regardless of the economic and social cost.
Unemployment insurance exists for good reason, and no-one has suggested abolishing it. However, the good that it does also comes with a cost in delaying the return of the unemployed to work. Economists from right to left and in the Obama administration agree about this. Wishing it were not so does not make it true. Congress should consider both the costs and benefits of extended UI benefits when weighing how many years of benefits to provide unemployed workers. (Heritage).
But what we have now is incest at it’s best.

The Safety Net

“It’s very sad. I think it’s just illustrating what dire straits our federal government budget is in,” said Sheila Zedlewski, director of the Urban Institute’s Income and Benefits Center. “It’s unprecedented to raid one safety net program to feed another.”
Democrats who reluctantly slashed a food stamp program to fund a state aid bill may have to do so again to pay for a top priority of first lady Michelle Obama.
The House will soon consider an $8 billion child nutrition bill that’s at the center of the first lady’s “Let’s Move” initiative. Before leaving for the summer recess, the Senate passed a smaller version of the legislation that is paid for by trimming the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly known as food stamps.

The proposed cuts would come on top of a 13.6 percent food stamp reduction in the $26 billion Medicaid and education state funding bill that President Obama signed this week.
Food stamps have made multiple appearances on the fiscal chopping block because Democrats have few other places to turn to offset the cost of legislation.
Party leaders raided the budget to find off-setting tax increases and spending cuts to pay for their top legislative priorities, including the roughly $900 billion health care law.
Democrats have turned to the food stamp program because funding increases enacted in the stimulus package last year were already scheduled to phase out over time. The changes proposed in the state aid and nutrition bills would simply cut off that increase early, in March 2014. Because the cuts would not take effect for more than three years, Democratic leaders have voiced the hope that they will be able to stop them in future legislation.
But House liberals are balking now, saying that while they swallowed the food stamp cuts to pay for urgent funding for Medicaid and teachers, they will not vote for more cuts in the child nutrition bill.
A House leadership aide noted that the food stamp decrease approved in the state aid bill will not take effect right away and will leave the program at the same funding level it was at before the stimulus law was signed. “That doesn’t mean many Democrats are not concerned about the issue, but this is a process which gives us time to deal with immediate issues (like jobs) and helping the economy grow, while giving you time to deal with the food stamp issue,” the aide said. (The Hill)

In other words, the card shuffling rob Peter-to-Pay-Paul-Wimpy-I’ll Pay you tomorrow for a hamburger (or food stamp)-today economics may be running a bit thin.
The idea that you can pay for massive spending with cuts 3 years from now in the hope that everything will be fine and and you won’t have to cut them in 3 years is some how saving money now is just wrong.
And these were eliminating increases that that they’d already passed!
Sounds like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic after it’s hit the iceberg!
But when you have The Agenda, and the Agenda must be passed and the end justifies the means, you’ll do and say anything to make it happen.

The deeper food stamp reductions in the Senate version would set an earlier date — in November 2013 — for eliminating the increased benefits passed last year.  A family of four would see their benefit reduced by $59 a month, or about 9 percent. The bill would also cut funding for nutrition education programs aimed at low-income neighborhoods and households.
But don’t worry, It will still be George W Bush’s fault if the cuts actually happen. Or evil rich people. Or Class warfare. It certainly won’t be there fault. And it’s just cutting an increase anyhow so no big deal (unless you’re the Bush Tax cuts where not increasing taxes is bad).
The truth is certainly not endangered.


I like this comment made on the article, it was suitably sarcastic:
No big deal. Just put a “cancel” on any payments from the treasury to cover charges for the Obama family’s entertainment amd travel budget. It would onlly take a few months of austerity in the White House to jumpstart the economy, balance the budget, and slash the deficit. If that doesn’t do it, garnish Obama’s salary, eliminate his empire of czars, and fire “Bozo” Gibbs. The first two measures would be sacrifices, and the third would be a sign of at least some intelligent life in the White House.

Now why would they want to interrupt their latest lavish vacation to do that? Gee, they are the elites and they are the ruling family why would they want to show any restraint?
They deserve it. They are better than you.
I guess we could always Eat their words…


Congress’ rationale for eliminating the 2003 Bush tax cuts is deficit reduction. This position would be more credible were congress not teeing-up additional discretionary spending programs in the form of various stimuli packages for union members and favored political allies whom Democrats need to please in order to ensure their re-election in November. The deficit can never be reduced if Congress doesn’t stop non-essential spending. (or this kind of Wimpy-I’ll-pay-tomorrow-for-what-I-spend-today economics).

Currently, it is not clear if the confiscatory tax policies proposed by Democrats are designed to reduce the deficit by increasing the government’s revenue or if they are designed to punish political opponents and those whose don’t share the flawed, Democrat, wealth-redistribution ideology. Increasingly, it’s looking as if the goal is to punish.
Low tax rates incentivize economic growth and investment. This has been proven time after time. But, Democrats prefer to focus, instead, on taxes on the “rich”, using inflammatory rhetoric that plays on our deepest fears and ego, fear that someone might be better than we are, have more than we do, rhetoric that encourages schadenfreude, a smug pleasure that those who have more than we, might be brought low by confiscatory tax policies.
The Democrat leaders in congress advocating against the Bush tax cuts are looking for a bogeyman—the rich—to be blamed for the failed Democrat fiscal and job creation policies. Punishing the “rich” is a campaign strategy that they hope will play well with voters this fall. (Townhall.com)

Let them EAT the “rich”. Meanwhile, the apparatchiks are being porked out of their minds.
And you, get to pay for it either way.


Oh, and just in case you didn’t know, their was another stimulus (aka bribe) recently also:
WASHINGTON (AP) — A check from Uncle Sam gets your attention, even if the money doesn’t help that much with the bills.
More than 750,000 Medicare recipients with high prescription costs each got a $250 government check this summer, and 3 million-plus more checks are going out to people who land in the program’s anxiety-inducing coverage gap.
Democrats, running scared in an election year, are trying to overcome older people’s mistrust of the new health care law, which expands coverage for younger generations by cutting Medicare payments to hospitals and insurers.
Will the ploy work?
“It’s like a teaser,” says Virginia Brant, 65, of Glendale, Ariz. “You go to Vegas and they give you the free spin on the wheel. We have had our teaser — the $250 — for us to say, ‘Gee, look at what we have coming.’”
Brant spent hers to help pay down a credit card she keeps for medications.
The checks arrive with a letter addressed directly to each beneficiary and signed by Kathleen Sebelius, President Barack Obama’s health secretary.
The money is “to bring you some needed relief on your prescription drug costs … the first step toward closing your coverage gap,” Sebelius says. Then comes the pitch: “Stay tuned for more information … on how this new law will help make Medicare more financially secure and provide you with higher quality and more affordable health care.”
Ooh, $250 bucks! Wow! that makes The Health Care Mandate  and the cuts in Medicare Advantage  (which is used for prescriptions mostly ) so much more palatable and makes me want to vote for a Democrat so they can continue to pork people without regard to the consequences!
I guess they could always cut food stamps again to pay for it….
So The democrats want to demagogue the rich, pay off their apparatchiks with your money and bribe people to vote for them in November.
Well at least some things haven’t changed in the swamp.