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On Unemployment

RALSTON: How would you have voted on that bill to extend unemployment benefits?


    ANGLE: I would have voted no, because the truth about it is that they keep extending these unemployment benefits to the point where people are afraid to go out and get a job because the job doesn't pay as much as the unemployment benefit does. And what we really need to do is put people back to work. So if you want to ease people back into work, what we need is an unemployment benefit that pays part. You know, you go to work, you have something of a safety net, in unemployment. But just to give them full unemployment benefits and then extend those for two years or more gets them not only out of the working class but it also depreciates their skills, so they're not actually able to go out and compete in that workforce, so what we really want, is we want something that stimulates a group of people to go back into what we know as that free market.

Ralston then played a clip of Angle, explaining her position thusly: "You can make more money on unemployment than you can going down and getting one of those jobs that is an honest job but it doesn't pay as much. We've put in so much entitlement into our government that we really have spoiled our citizenry."


It’s hard to argue with Sharon Angle -- she’s not wrong, but it’s going to be hard to watch the results of the new cold turkey method of fiscal responsibility if she’s right, and if things stand the way they are standing right now. Unemployment may indeed be the opiate of the people, but it’s important to remember that societies really give the wretched masses narcotics to keep them tame -- so they don’t go around with too much time to think about changing things or breaking things. Fat unemployed white people make a lot of noise when you try to pull the tits out of their mouths too fast, and this recession is not about the chronically unemployed – who know the system and how to game it, it’s about virgins with high expectations, fixed costs and attitudes of entitlement born from permissive parenting – it’s different; it’s me – it’s a whole shit load of individual me’s, and all of us require a lot of lubrication before giving it up without kicking some balls and scratching some eyeballs out.

I’m not going to give excuses why people stay on unemployment, they all have their own motivations and fear, as I certainly do. There comes a time when you have to say that the dream is over, or at least on hold, and to find a job – any job, and to get back to work. If you have any value at all, and work hard, in a couple of years things will get better. It’s America and things will work out because they always do if you work hard.

That being said: there are a lot of people and businesses that suck on a lot of tits of entitlement that weaken them and make them less dependent on work and skill in this country, and it seems somewhat cruel to pick on people whose jobs were eliminated through no fault of their own and outsourced for profit to lower wage countries, but, I suppose, it’s a start.




  

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