REPUBLICAN JOBS PLAN: CASTIGATE THE UNEMPLOYED

From Washington Monthly's Political Animal blog, courtesy of Eschaton:

In the latest example, we see Pennsylvania Attorney General Tom Corbett (R), the frontrunner in this year's gubernatorial race, arguing publicly that jobless workers in his state are choosing not to work, preferring to live on meager unemployment aid.

Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Corbett on Friday accused some jobless Pennsylvanians of choosing to collect unemployment checks rather than going back to work, prompting swift criticism from his Democratic opponent and one of the state's top labor leaders.

"The jobs are there. But if we keep extending unemployment, people are just going to sit there," Corbett told Harrisburg radio station WITF at a campaign stop in Elizabethtown. "I've literally had construction companies tell me, 'I can't get people to come back to work until . . . they say, "I'll come back to work when unemployment runs out."'"

I obviously can't speak with confidence about what some guy told some other guy who in turn told Corbett. But the general argument is getting quite tiresome.

"The jobs are there"? No, they're really not. Nationwide, there are five applicants for every one opening, which is a terribly painful ratio. Pennsylvania's unemployment rate is currently at a 26-year high.

More here.

This is a variation on the old Cadillac-driving welfare queen narrative. Nice little change up for the new millennium. I guess. But wagging a shame inducing figure at the unemployed isn't going to create any new jobs. At least, not in the real world. The above excerpted post goes on to observe that this kind of language is all over the place in Republican land, which just reinforces my dawning realization that Republicans, in addition simply to being mean spirited, just don't understand economics.

I mean, some of them do, or at least they're starting to. But most of the tribe is mired in some thirty years worth of demagoguery disguised as economic philosophy.

I mean okay, there is a kind of internal logic here: why get a job when you're getting free income from the government? Never mind, for a moment, that you can't get a job that doesn't exist: such "logic" makes a mockery of human psychology. Unemployment payments are only a fraction of what was made on the job, but rent, bills, debt, and groceries continue to cost just as much. Believe me, UE insurance makes joblessness easier, but when you're getting it, you still desperately want to get back into the work force. Furthermore, unemployment, even when you're getting government money, isn't some sort of wonderful vacation. Indeed, it's more like a blast of personal meaninglessness, a trip into the bowels of existential misery. People don't work simply to make money; they also work to make their lives have meaning. You can play video games when you wake up every morning for only so long before you know, without any doubt, that your life absolutely sucks.

Then there's the conservative "logic" that McDonald's is always hiring, which, of course, it is. And that's a fine jobs plan, too, "everybody go work at McDonald's." On the other hand, if you take such "logic" to its, well, logical conclusion, you're talking about total destruction of the middle class, which has been happening, anyway, very slowly for decades now, as organized labor has become emasculated, and domestic manufacturing outsourced to third world countries.

The bottom line here is that telling the unemployed that they're lazy good for nothing parasites for not having jobs is so beyond absurdity as a serious economic assertion that it ultimately constitutes nothing but callous cruelty. But we already knew that, right?

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