More Unemployment Insurance Won't Stimulate Growth

Extended benefits keep some workers searching for jobs they will not find

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A wise man can see more from the bottom of a well than a fool can from a mountain top. ~Authors under Your comments

Sam Gjata of MA 9:12AM December 10, 2012

A wise man can see more from the bottom of a well than a fool can from a mountain top. ~Authors under Your comments

Sam Gjata of MA 9:11AM December 10, 2012

A wise man can see more from the bottom of a well than a fool can from a mountain top. ~Authors under Your comments

Sam Gjata of MA 9:10AM December 10, 2012

EB should be eliminated. People are taking advantage of the system. I know so many people who collect the benefits and do not look for a job. They go on trips and enjoy their lives while people like me work so hard and pay taxes. Taxpayers suffer! People just don't want to work while they get free money. They are picky and choosey. No more federal extensions on unemployment benefits! How long are you going to pay those lazy people?!!

Taxpayer of CA 2:31AM October 21, 2012

James- college educated and a veteran and unemployed for the past 9 mos. It's pretty easy sitting in your cloud and drawing a paycheck. Well how about $54.00 last payday. You don't have a reality clue as to what unemployed really means. A majority of owners, big and small, are not hiring full time- flexible days every week so one cannot set a definite schedule each week because the days change. Obamacare and unsettling tax law potential changes keep the businessowners uneasy and I don't blame them for not hiring fulltime- I have to suffer. So when you plan your first of the month bills and substitute your net income as $54.00 let me know how it goes in producing your balance sheet.

George Moniot of TX 6:31PM August 30, 2012

You say the unemployed may have to move to get jobs. Well how do you expect them to move to get jobs with no money.

Unemployment is the peoples last life line. We need it for food, phone, gas to go to interviews or grocery store, feed the kids, etc...

The 99 weeks is not a true number. The States 26 weeks never lasts 26 weeks normally. You take the amount of the benefit maximum allowed for each tier and divide that by amount you get per week. That would give you the real number of weeks you will get for each tier. Then add up all the weeks you would qualify for the state and extended benefits.

Every time you run out of a Tier you have to worry if the extension is still in effect because congress has to fight over getting the extensions past. Then us unemployed are stuck with tons of late fees which further put us in a worse financial condition.

Rob of IN 9:41AM January 12, 2012

Extending unemployment benefits it’s a sensitive issue. At the same time that it is going to cost a lot to extend them, it is the only income that allows people (especially those with families) to barely scrape by. Thee folks are in a bit of a predicament because while they face discrimination for being unemployed, they also become more unemployable because they continue to not be able to find work (http://eng.am/sTx56Vv). This insurance is the only thing that many of them have to survive until getting back on their feet. It is not an ideal situation, but what would the other readers on this thread suggest we do?

Florian Schach of NY 4:45PM December 12, 2011

http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2011/12/five_reasons_extendUI.html

CathieD of NJ 3:30PM December 12, 2011

‎"In all recorded history there has not been one economist who has had to worry about where the next meal would come from." ~ Ferdinand Drucker

Cathie D of NJ 3:56PM December 10, 2011

You, sir, are again wrong. You don't state any facts, it's simply teapublican rhetoric and nonsense. There are upwards of 30 million under and unemployed and less than 3 million full-time job openings. The job openings ratio to unemployed is unacceptable. Here's another stat for your highly paid, compromised thought process; the unemployed spend the money they receive, thus increasing spending and GDP. The average amount that people recieve in benefits ranges from less than $200 a week in Miss. to $500 a week in some generous states. Could you live on that? Doubtful, but you live by bashing the less fortunate and the less connected. You are too disconnected from reality to realize who suffers the consequences of your policies.

Here's another fact: According to the SF federal Reserve, while extended unemployment benefits may slightly increase the unemployment rate, they said as follows; "Although economists have shown that extended availability of UI benefits will increase unemployment duration, the effect in the latest downturn appears quite small compared with other determinants of the unemployment rate. Our analyses suggest that extended UI benefits account for about 0.4 percentage point of the nearly 6 percentage point increase in the national unemployment rate over the past few years. It is not surprising that the disincentive effects of UI would loom small in the midst of the most severe labor market downturn since the Great Depression."

You have been spreading the same misinformation for the past few years. Since you last stated that extended benefits don't create jobs, the unemployment rate has fallen from 10% to 8.6%. Does extending unemployment benefits have an impact in that improvement? Likely.

And all it would take is a very small surcharge on the mega-wealthy and bailed-out banker bonuses to pay for any extension that would help millions of people who were left unemployed by the crony capitalist "free market" system you often espouse.

While the country may be in debt, it's a fact that the trillion $ unfunded Bush tax cuts, the trillion $ unfunded wars and the near trillion $ unfunded prescription drug planned catered to the pharma industry had a lot more to do with our current fiscal condition than unemployment benefits.

michael of NY 1:38PM December 10, 2011

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