If you were appointed America’s chief of policymaking, how many weeks would you assign to unemployment checks?
What is reasonable?
Fifty-two weeks?
Fewer?
How about three months?
Present federal law allows 73 weeks – close to a year and a half of Mondays, accepting handouts, checks that someone else earned.
To place that number in perspective, imagine a 73-week vacation.
Envision going to Honolulu, or your mother-in-law’s, for 73 consecutive weeks, arising at any hour that interests you (or her), lying on the beach as long as it is daylight.
Newspapers and the internet were heavy over the weekend with mournful reports of 1.3 million former workers losing their unemployment checks as of two days ago.
Our friends on the left wailed louder than screaming football crowds that families, meaning vulnerable, hungry children, will suffer needlessly through this cozy, global-warming winter because rich Republicans are heartless. Men who have been lying on their southsides are whitewashed by our wincingly honest liberal betters.
The cheapskate GOP Congress, we are lectured by out betters, have determined that one year and four months of unemployment checks is, by golly, enough time for other Americans to pay their bills and support their habits.
How can you not go to work for 73 straight weeks?
Can anyone out there in Newspaperland imagine being out of work for one year and four months?
The left-wing Associated Press produced this three-handkerchief lead from Orange County Saturday night:
WESTMINSTER, Calif. (AP) — The end of unemployment checks for more than a million people on Saturday is driving out-of-work Americans to consider selling cars, moving and taking minimum wage work after already slashing household budgets and pawning personal possessions to make ends meet.
Now to the heart of the tale:
Ending the five-year-old 73-week program “that extended benefits for the long-term jobless affected 1.3 million people immediately and will affect hundreds of thousands more who remain jobless in the months ahead. Under the program, the federal government provided an average monthly stipend of $1,166.
The end of the program may prompt a drop in the nation's unemployment rate, but not necessarily for a good reason. People out of work are required to look for work to receive unemployment benefits. As benefits disappear, some jobless will stop looking for work out of frustration and will no longer be counted as unemployed.
The trend has already emerged in North Carolina, which started cutting off extended benefits in July. The state's unemployment rate went down — from 8.8 percent in June to 7.4 percent in November— even though the number of North Carolinians who said they had jobs rose only slightly in that time.
Once you run out of other people’s money, a smart politician once said, you land a supposedly elusive job fast – if you plan to eat every day.
