Press Releases Fly. Unemployment Soars.

I'm not sure why we're having the unemployment insurance extension debate right now. I can imagine good arguments about reforming our unemployment system, and I'd even go along with many of them. But the time for such changes are when we're at reasonable unemployment levels. Cut off unemployment now and we'll see the homeless rate skyrocket, and our recovery will be much slower. Looking at the homeless issue alone – it's very easy to end up on the street, but we've found it's very hard (and expensive) to get people back into homes.

I heard a great argument the other day about military spending. We have three seperate systems to counteract a nuclear war with Russia: planes, subs and ICBM's. Cut just one of those programs and we'll still have redundant systems (to a threat that is all but gone), yet we'll free up a huge amount of money. Our two major expenditures are military and debt service. Looking at unemployment for funds – at a time like this – is inhumane.

“With unemployment at 9.5 percent Americans probably want answers not political gotchas. Will extending benefits stave off a Great Depression style spiral or will staving off deficits? Behind the the cutesy press releases, that’s the question in election 2010.”

It's also the question that neither party will answer. But the question you pose is not a zero-sum answer of mutual exclusitivity.

Democrats believe in the spend, borrow, tax cycle. Republicans believe in the spend and tax cycle. The difference lies in what programs are worth “borrowing for” and which are not, while there are many programs both will borrow and spend for (war, etc). Both parties rely on some twisted form of Keynesianism, while denouncing it at the same time. Both claim to believe in ” a balanced budget” when both know that such is deflationary, especially when aggregate demand and capacity utilization (people wanting stuff, people making stuff) is down. The US has been rolling a debt s for 200 years, and with the exception of immediately after WW2 and today, hasn't been exceptional.

Both parties ultimately rely on telling people what they want to hear, and then when in power, pursue what they had planned all along in spite of the demand for “change” and other horse pucky.

So, the short answer to the question about unemployment benefits is….it will have little to do with any macroeconomic outcome in the short term. Long term…start putting people on the streets and the system itself comes under threat. That is the lesson of the Depression, one the Democrats remember, and one the Republicans hopes come to pass in order tokick start something they were never able to in the 1930s: a rescue model based on the neo-classical model, a la Ricardo, Hayek, etc.

But the truth is that Murray was an enabler of the people that sent the system into the spiral in 2008, and she continues to soft peddle reforms, though if you talk to her press agent, you will hear a different tune. The “New Economy” is a failure, and it's time to write the epitaph, and flush that era's politicians with it. Too bad Dino is such a choad.

I'm happy to agree with Matt_the_Engineer for a change, and for the same reasons.

Josh's statement, “Seems to me that both sides are being hypocritical” is just more of Josh's shallow, vacuous, superficial, glib false equivalency. You're really equating PAYGO with war, death, and destruction, Josh? Have you no shame whatever?

Josh is about as qualified to comment on national politics as he is on quantum physics.

You forgot to add that emergency spending – and millions of Americans out of work is an emergency – is not subject to PAYGO rules. Really, it's only Dino Rossi and the Republicans who are being hypocritical here, and they're making the wrong choice. We need to extend unemployment benefits now.

Are you sure that unemployment has “soared” recently? Nationally, I think it's been relatively steady for a year. There have been minor dips from a few private industry hires, from temporary census employment, and from people giving up on looking for work (at which point they're not counted as officially unemployed). But there have also been spikes– first and most massively from private sector layoffs, but also more recently from a wave of public sector layoffs at the state and local level, and from people who start looking for work once the private sector began to slowly hire again.

As for WA state, unemployment here is down a little bit recently, though it's not at all clear where a significant recovery would come from especially when one considers the effect that further state and local budget cuts will have on unemployment along with the re-entry of people who had given up looking for work into the economy.

In addition, the numbers being used to describe unemployment rates are highly misleading. A recent poll found that if you don't assume just head-of-household employment as the ideal (and that has been extremely difficult for working families to achieve since the 1970s), the real unemployment rate is closer to 22 percent.

http://www.dailyfinance.com/story/careers/what-…

You'd think that the lived experience of 22 percent unemployment (much worse in places like Michigan) would blow the roof off of our political system, disrupting both the Democratic and Republican parties. But unemployment insurance, credit card debt, and student loans provide temporary relief that encourages individuals to go deeper into debt they have less and less chance of paying off. And for the very poor, there is the War on Drugs…

Why, in this moment, politicians would consider de-funding unemployment is beyond me. Perhaps they don't realize how precarious their position is, how close so many people are to bankruptcy and poverty? Or maybe they are blinded by their own hubris, and that the impoverishment of working families can help one party's politics instead of discrediting all party politics?

There's no reason that the Republicans should be interested in extending unemployment insurance benefits now, or doing anything else to help people survive this economy. We have a Democratic administration and a (nominally) Democratic Congress, and the worse the situation gets and the more the Republicans can demonstrate that worsening under the Dems, the more likely people may vote the Dems out in November.

It isn't the American people's job to figure out where these funds come from just so they come. People who worked and qualify for these benefits are losing everything they have worked for because Congress can't figure out how to fund benefits. That is their job to find a way. Not for their voter's to be left out in the cold if they qualify. Since they seem to vacation more than they work no wonder we are in such a mess. 175K a year to be off and not get your required jobs done before vacation. What an example they set for the working class. Slackers need ousted, pocket liners need ousted, salaries need lowered due to the fact they accomplish less than the average workers do. Shame. Quit funding for other countries and help your own. $$ is found for other countries and it should not even get to this point for your own citizens. Shame again