The Dichotomy Of Unemployment Extensions

     It must be wonderful to be Barack Obama and be able to speak out of both sides of your mouth and have a slavish media that will convince a low-information public of the legitimacy of all your positions, even when they contradict each other. And the media, ah yes the media. That organized propaganda arm of the Democrat party which has the ability to report government shutdowns because of frigid weather as necessary, but a shutdown of far less government functions resulting from some Republicants standing up for fiscal sanity, as the end of civilization as we know it.
     But I digress, back to my original point that we have a President that is as unacquainted with the truth as he is with decency and honor. Leading him and his slobbering devotees in the Senate, House and the main stream of Leftist society to push for an extension of federal unemployment benefits for the non-working. While at the same time they pound their chests about how their policies have brought the job market roaring back to life. If the latter is true, the former is unnecessary. Federal taxpayer dollars should never be used to subsidize unemployment. These kinds of subsidies have been shown by a multitude of studies to lead to more unemployment because of the tendency of the unemployed to wait until their subsidy is ending before they look for employment in earnest.
     The breathtaking idiocy of the position taken by President Obama and congressional Democrats was best exemplified by the recent remark by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who said that for every dollar paid out in unemployment benefits, a dollar fifty of economic activity is generated. Further comments saw Democrats actually saying 200 thousand jobs would be lost unless they were given the authority to use taxpayer dollars to subsidize persons not working. If what the Majority Leader and other Democrats are saying was true, then all this country would need to do to create a roaring economy would be to put every American on unemployment and sit back and watch the growth.
     The fact is that for every dollar paid out in unemployment benefits, a dollar fifty must be confiscated from the economy by government, the dollar that goes to the recipient and fifty cents to pay for the bureaucracy to administer it. And while unemployment recipients may spend their entire check in the private economy, there is no recouping of the bureaucratic costs involved in the transaction. Additionally, those recipients of taxpayer dollars would actually spend more money in creating economic activity if they had jobs, which would allow them to actually create new wealth instead of simply transferring and redistributing current wealth.
     It is illustrative of the Lefts complete lack of compassion for unemployed Americans that they argue for extending the crumbs of government-administered unemployment checks, instead of the creation of jobs so these individuals can buy a whole loaf. But it is exemplary of Leftist policy religiously evangelized by Democrats and others whose only real goal is to grow government by shrinking personal wealth. The unemployed, like so many other "beneficiaries" of Leftist policies, have been damaged, some irreparably, by those very policies whose aim is not to help Americans up but to keep them down under the weight of an increasingly obese federal government.