Take a close look at this chart:
Notice anything significant?
As noted by Daniel Indiviglio of The Atlantic:
“That giant gap consists of Americans who are unemployed, and couldn’t get a job even if they wanted to. This emphasizes the need for Congress to extend unemployment benefits. It’s pretty clear that millions of Americans remain unemployed because the jobs aren’t there — not because they aren’t trying hard enough to find them. In fact, it’s not even close.”
Now sure, there are probably some folks who truly may take advantage of the unemployment compensation system in order to avoid getting a job, but as the graph above clearly illustrates, there’s a giant gap between the number of people who are unemployed and the number of jobs that are available to those individuals, and it’s for all those folks who want to find work but can’t that unemployment benefits should be extended.
Zach, most GOP Senators aren’t arguing whether or not unemployment extensions should be extended (well, you know what I mean!), rather they’re standing firm on insisting that unemployment benefits be PAID FOR by reallocating heretofore unspent stimulus monies.
Taking stimulus money meant to create jobs to assist people without jobs just doesn’t make sense.
And why not?
Maybe they could just stop making $10,000 signs touting the stimulus (http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/signs-stimulus/story?id=11163180) and use that money to help pay benefits. And that’s the point. I think we can all realize unemployment benefits are a priority so why not shift some money around to pay for it? Are you really telling me that there’s not some arts grant or research project measuring the heartbeats of dolphins that can’t be cut for 1 year to pay for this?!
psst…. ixnay on the emphatagisaye…..
What are you, the HTML police?