George Rebane
Government can improve our lives only if it takes more of our money and liberties. Collectivist tenet
We woke up this morning to NPR’s dutiful support of the Dems’ initiative to extend unemployment benefits beyond their current 99 weeks limit. The network devoted a supportive segment of its news for that legislation, and then added on a longer editorial piece, seasoned with income inequality references, that highlighted first person interviews with two longtime unemployed single women which were quite heart rending. In this election year, these offerings were clearly meant to divert further consideration of the liberals’ mismanagement of the nation’s economic recovery since the summer of 2009, along with the reminders of DOJ and IRS scandals, the Benghazi massacre, ongoing foreign policy disasters, and the munificent blessings of Obamacare.
Without the now well-worn recounting of how Team Obama has stifled economic growth that produced the slowest recovery on record, we do remind ourselves that if workforce participation today were what it was before the recession, then unemployment would still be above 10%. And, of course, that is where it really is when we look past the hokey employment numbers the feds publish.
But this is an election year, and vote buying from the ignorant and the too desperate to think straight is swinging into high gear. The leftwing politicians’ job security formula is both staid and firmly established. First, impede job creation and maximize the view that government, not the private sector, provides the good things in life. Then as the (real) jobless ranks swell, with great ballyhoo introduce new welfare programs to help the unemployed while vilifying all opponents of added spending as uncaring of the nation’s poor and the unfortunate. This will guarantee that more legions of the uninformed and the information-proof will vote for the same politicians and policies that got them where they now are, and keep them there.
If you are a leftwing politician, what is there not to like about this time-tested and proven approach? After all, since we are a democracy, let the people speak.
[updated] A new entitlement in the making? Besides the attempt by the Dems to distract the country from the rank incompetence of this administration, the real objective here with the fifth year continuance of extended unemployment benefits could be to create a new entitlement category. This would be the equivalent of being declared disabled and eligible for long term disability benefits. In the case of unemployment, a former worker could qualify to be declared ‘chronically unemployable’ or ‘terminally untrainable’ or suffering from a broad-based ‘skills deficit’, or whatever … .
The point of the title to this piece is that the socialist politician is always looking to lock in another cohort of reliable voters. That our friends on the Left attempt to equate the current unemployment benefits run with that of our last president is understandable. We leave it for them to answer how many years of breast-beating “economic recovery” is needed before this president stops calling for the next “emergency extension” of benefits, and admits that we now need a brand new entitlement to handle those permanently unemployed for reasons other than physical or mental disabilities. In short, that he and his private sector innocent team will not allow the American economy to create the jobs required to bring real unemployment down to the levels enjoyed under more enlightened public policies. You see, they don’t have to do any fancy thinking on this – just get out of the way.
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