My tweet importer thingy, which depends on the increasingly unreliable FriendFeed, has been up and down, but I just a series of posted tweets that I wanted to reproduce here.
WARNING: Rant ahead. Contains some salty language. Proceed at your own risk.
The tweets were inspired by this article, in which Glenn Beck reveals himself, once again, to be a monstrous asshole of the first order:
Unemployed activists have clamored for news attention to the plight of the “99ers,” people who have exhausted the unprecedented 99 weeks of unemployment benefits made available in some states to fight the worst recession since the Great Depression.
They got some attention they might not have wanted on Monday, when Fox News host Glenn Beck introduced them to his viewers. “Have you heard of the 99ers?” said Beck, showing video from a New York rally last Thursday. “Some of these people, I bet you’d be ashamed to call them Americans.”
Beck had free advice for the jobless activists at the protest: “Don’t spend your remaining money on travel to get to a protest. Go out and get a job. You may not want the job. Work at McDonald’s. Work two jobs. There has been plenty of times in my life I’ve done jobs I hated, but I had no choice. Two years is plenty of time to have lived off your neighbor’s wallet.”
It’s an argument that resonates with many members of Congress, especially Republicans. Some long-term jobless, however, might counter that they’ve been turned down for jobs for which they were overqualified because of age discrimination, or because managers don’t want to hire someone who will bolt for a better job as soon as the economy improves. For every story about a business owner complaining that potential workers would rather live on unemployment insurance, there’s another about businesses flat-out refusing to hire the unemployed. After all, there are nearly 15 million unemployed competing for three million jobs.
Another way of phrasing the intro to the above paragraph would be: “It’s an argument that resonates with many members of Congress, especially Republicans. Some long-term jobless, however, might counter these demogogic emotional appeals to unreason, prejudice and reflexive cultural-war bullshit with actual facts. For instance…”
Anyway, here’s my tweeted response:
Glenn Beck On Long-Term Unemployed: ‘Ashamed To Call Them Americans’ http://huff.to/bBjsWz | I’m ashamed to call Glenn Beck an American.
Some conservatives think EVERYTHING is fodder for a personal-responsibility culture war. Circumstances be damned; it’s always victims’ fault.
This overreaction to liberal victimology is one of the most repulsive strains in American politics, and a key reason I remain left of center.
If you think the primary cause of long-term unemployment NOW, in worst job recession since WWII, is laziness, you’re an idiot or a bad person.
Are there some lazy unemployeds? Of course. But they’re so far from being the central issue that they aren’t even worth talking about.
The overwhelming hypocrisy, self-righteousness, and total lack of compassion in the Beck argument is beyond repulsive. It’s almost evil.
If you can’t tell, Beck struck a nerve, as this is a long-running pet peeve of mine. Don’t get me wrong: there are times when liberal policies enable or incentivize personal irresponsibility. (Of course, so do conservative policies at times — though it’s usually the rich, rather than the poor, who are incentivized by conservative policies to behave irresponsibly. But that’s another post for another day.) It’s important to have sane, adult conservative voices, promoting personal responsibility, as a check on liberals’ tendency to engage in excessive victimology. I genuinely believe that.
But so often, particularly in venues like talk radio, right-wing conservatives take this philosophy much too far, basically adopting, as an article of faith, the belief that anyone who fails or struggles is automatically (or at least presumptively) to blame for their own troubles, due to laziness or irresponsibility or some other fault — or perhaps I should say, sin — that’s internal to the struggling individual. In other words, they assume, in the absence of any other information, that it’s the victim’s fault.
This assumption is never tested or critically examined; it is, as I said, an article of faith. And it’s applied to everything that touches on pocketbook issues, be it the debate over our health-care system (with its incredibly complex problems and often incredibly perverse incentives) or, as we now see, the discussion of long-term unemployment amid a terrible, terrible recession, in which it should be transparently obvious to anyone with a fucking brain, and a functional heart and soul, that the primary reason people are struggling is because the whole fucking nation is struggling, due to a variety of forces far beyond our individual control. But heaven forbid we look at any of that: no, the “haves” can just blame it all on the “laziness” of the “have-nots,” and sleep well at night knowing they’re simply better than all those God-damn liberals/hippies/minorities/lazy people whose moral character and Protestant work ethic just isn’t good enough.
(Pardon my French — I get fired up about this.)
The self-righteousness is overwhelming and repulsive, as I said. And so is the hypocrisy. Because, of course, the moment the people who believe these things are the ones to suffer misfortune — they lose their jobs, their health insurance, whatever — they’ll immediately blame external circumstances (most likely in the person of Obama), without bothering to critically examine whether perhaps they were wrong to dismiss all those other people who blamed external circumstances after suffering similar misfortunes. Because of course, these compassionless fuckwads know that they aren’t lazy. But it’s still okay to assume that everyone else, or at least a large majority of the similarly situated “others,” is lazy.
On the bright side, Beck’s rant — and more broadly, its underlying premise, which has been implicitly endorsed by the GOP caucus through its nearly uniform opposition to unemployment extensions — is at least clarifying. Under some circumstances, the right wing’s default position of assuming everything is the victim’s fault has at least some semi-plausible factual basis. (Occasionally, it’s even right!) But if there was ever a moment when hewing to this party line is just patently unreasonable, it’s now. No reasonable person can possibly believe that, in this severe employment crisis, at this moment in our economic history, laziness or personal irresponsibility are significant drivers of the nearly unprecedented long-term unemployment we’re seeing. It’s just not a plausible, rational thing to think. Anyone who thinks this is automatically disqualified as a serious commentator on anything, ever. As right-of-center tweeter PoliticalMath wrote in response to my tweet-rant:
joblessness issue #1: economic/policy uncertainty #2: credit contraction #3: resurgence in savings 4: loss of mobility due to housing market #5: shift in US job markets… laziness is probably down near #15
Anyone who doesn’t recognize the utter irrelevance of “laziness” to the present unemployment debate is, as I said earlier, either an idiot or a bad person. Or, to be more charitable, perhaps I should say, either an idiot, a bad person, or an otherwise intelligent person who has been unfortunately hoodwinked by the clever, dangerously effective demagoguery and propaganda of truly terrible human beings like the execrable Glenn Beck.
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How DARE you, Brendan! Glenn Beck is a national hero. He should be deified. I have his picture in the living room and I bow down to his wisdom, his insight, his brave exposes and his brilliant journalism as least once a day. To say that Glenn Beck is anything but a scholar and an advocate for the truth exposes you as the villainous, vile, elitist, bum-loving socialist that you are!
Or uh, something like that. 😛
I think the obvious answer would be just to eliminate all poor people from the planet. But then Jesus said the poor will always be with us, so I’m unsure that would really work.
Maybe we can construct some sort of other Earth, perhaps an Earth-2, AML and place the poor on that. Then they’d be with us, but, you know, a farther away sort of with us.
Anyway, good piece Brendan. I like when you get all fired up and swear-y. Makes me recall the days when classmates used to beg you to utter a profanity. Good times. Beyond that though, surprise, surprise, I agree with you.
I will mount a very limited defense of Beck. Taken at face value, he is speaking about “some of these people”. He is referring to a subset of the 99ers, not necessarily all of them, and by definition that is also exclusive of those who have been unemployed for less time than the 99ers. Given all those caveat emptors, I don’t think it’s outlandish to agree that some of them would make us ashamed.
Separately, the argument that two years is the limit for how much time we should pay for unemployment, even in this unique recession, is not an assholish argument in and of itself. At a minimum, maybe unemployment amounts should start decreasing at some point, there should be increased job training requirements, and other burdens placed on the extension. The human face of unemployment is indeed tragic, but statistical analysis doesn’t lie — extending unemployment benefits helps elevate the unemployment rate, as some people do wait until the very end to start looking for jobs.
Whatever the case may be, despite how nasty this particular recession is, this is hardly the 1930s, and my capacity to feel sympathy for the 99ers is relatively limited. I’d rather my tax money that is currently paying for unemployment benefit extensions go to pay for housing and feeding the street children I’ve seen in places like Bogota.
Overall, I’d say Beck is being a bit assholish and is over-generalizing (gee, that never happens on cable talk shows!), but the crux of his argument is not outlandish.
Brendan – you are projecting again …
Can you show where Beck has said that “everyone/anyone” who is a 99er is lazy ?
You quote him yourself – ““Some of these people, I bet you’d be ashamed to call them Americans.”” {my emphasis} …
I realise that it is really easy to lash out at the Becks of this world, especially when you cannot bring yourself to treat a much more proximate cause of the problem (whether the 110th Congress of which Obama was part – or the 111th Congress with Obama as President) with anything near the indignation and vitriol with which you choose to treat Beck …
Or am I missing the way that Beck is responsible for the current economic circumstances affecting this country ?
Sorry – I should phrase it in Brendan-speak … “The self-righteousness is overwhelming and repulsive” …
I second Alasdair. I fully expect Brendan to disagree with Glenn Beck on subjects like these, but when Brendan so completely flips his lid over what is essentially just a crude defense of why extending unemployment benefits is a bad idea, it unmasks and betrays his supposed objective centrism. Whenever the going gets rough and something political is at stake (e.g. the 2004 presidential election, the 2008 presidential election, the 2010 election season), Brendan takes a side – just like the rest of us do – and then hammers his opponents with zealous ideological partisanship of the same nature he frequently ascribes to (and derides in) his conservative opposition.
I think the obvious answer would be just to eliminate all poor people from the planet. But then Jesus said the poor will always be with us, so I’m unsure that would really work.
You know why the poor will always be with us? Because we literally constantly change the definition of poor upwards.
The number one problem of the poor in the U.S. is not hunger, it is obesity.
The average poor person in America today has a better standard of living than at least 90% of all people who have ever lived.
You understand that obesity amongst those in poverty (and near poverty) is the result of eating cheap processed foods, not because they are dining out on filets, lobster, and foie gras, yes?
You understand that obesity amongst those in poverty (and near poverty) is the result of eating cheap processed foods, not because they are dining out on filets, lobster, and foie gras, yes?
So what?
Am I supposed to be upset that my civilization can provide enough cheap, safe food that starvation is not a worry much less a problem?
One minor point, AML, the only way to get unemployment benefits is to prove each week that you are actively looking for and applying to jobs. I’m told that there is a minimum number of applications per week also, but I do not know what that number is. If you receive a job offer from that you are no longer eligible for unemployment benefits.
As someone who has actually been on unemployment twice, believe me it is very easy to milk the system.
To those attempting to defend Beck at the edges on some sort of technicality that he said “some people.” This is misleading (I’m not sure whether it’s intentional or not, it doesn’t really matter), as of course some people are lazy. No one would seriously posit that no people are lazy. So to spend the breath stating what he does, it’s implicit that he’s talking about more than a small minority that of course exists just by virtue of the fact that any large group of people will have some undesirables in the lot.
Further, he implies that there are plenty of crappy jobs available for those who are unemployed. Heck, work two! How clueless is this? There are no jobs.
So gahrie, your argument here is what, that you’ve committed unemployment fraud? Then it seems a touch hypocritical to complain about others bilking the unemployment system, yes or no?
Also I take issue with the word “safe” in #10. Processed food is not safe. Nor does it provide proper nutrition, which is why people get so freaking fat. The caloric excess required to get sufficient nutrition form this “food” leads to lots of excess useless calories (mostly from fake sugar, a.k.a. high fructose corn syrup) that is stored as fat which strains body systems to the breaking point and is fatal. So no, the food they can afford is not safe. The food most people in this country eat is not safe. Even a significant percentage of fruits and vegetables no longer possess the nutrients that they once did, mostly due to soil degradation. Additionally, irresponsible farming practices subsidized by the US government to make the cheap crap food artificially cheap and extra crappy.
So gahrie, your argument here is what, that you’ve committed unemployment fraud?
Where did I even remotely come close to saying that?
And dcl..if someone gave you $10 million in gold you’d bitch that it weighed too much and that was somehow the fault of the evil Republicans…………..
dcl @ #14, while your points about processed foods and how we get them speaks to regulatory malpractice on the part of the USDA, it does not reflect anything of substance regarding gahrie’s point about poverty continually being redefined upwards. I know plenty of people with tons of disposable income who nevertheless eat out every night and rely on unhealthy, prepackaged processed foods for lunch and snacks. Not to mention, my wife sponsors a program through her volunteer organization that works with a major grocery store chain in the area to teach parents below the poverty line how to shop for healthy foods on a budget.
Jim @ #13, I partially concede your rebuttal, which is why at the outset I said I’d only be mounting a very limited defense and posited a bunch of caveats. Be that as it may, Glenn Beck’s paycheck is directly tied to his ability to inflame passions and excite viewers, so why in the world would you bother criticizing him for being too loose with the words “some people” and overgeneralizing about the unemployed? Were you seriously expecting Beck’s shtick to be more like WFB on Firing Line?
Heh. Fair enough.
But put yourself in my shoes. Imagine people actually listened to that idiot Randi Rhodes? I’m sure it’d drive you up the wall too. Luckily for both of us that’s not a real problem. 🙂
I just wanted to chime in agreement with AML #7.
Brendan is nothing but a liberal hypocrite. He pretends to be neutral, but then he passionately opposes retarded things that (some) conservatives say! And there is not one example, NOT ONE, in the entire history of this blog (and indeed, Brendan’s hypocritical life), where Brendan has ever said anything bad about a liberal.
Indeed, it is times like this (and 2004) that the true Brendan comes oozing turdlike out of his snakeskin, reeking of partisan feculence, to spray his wroth upon the innocents.
Further, I believe that Brendan cares very much about my opinions of him, and will be both hurt and intimidated by my mighty intellectual insight when he reads this ingenuous comment that I have commented.
Casey:
Methinks thou doest protest too much…….
Casey, it boils down to truth in advertising. Brendan just needs to admit that he’s as much a partisan of the left as gahrie or Joe Mama or I might admit we are partisans of the right. That’s all I’ve ever asked for.
gahrie:
I don’t see an I’ve heard, or a it looks like, or was told about loop holes you could drive a truck through. Nope, just believe me it is very easy to milk the system. It looks a lot like you’ve done some of that milking, by your own admission.
So dcl, who’s worse: Someone who’s discovered how to milk a broken system, possibly even taken advantage of the loopholes, but then demands reform of the broken system to close these loopholes and disincentivize fraud and abuse? Or someone who defends the status quo and the plight of the 99ers and de facto supports the extension of unemployment benefits (subject to aforementioned waste, fraud, and abuse) seemingly into infinity?
Ad hominems against gahrie don’t work when you’re ultimately attacking him for supporting the reform of a broken system that you’re defending. Your message becomes: “People are bad for milking and abusing the system; gahrie is bad for milking and abusing the system; the system shouldn’t be reformed to prevent further milking and abuse, and should in fact be extended because the recession is bad and these people are poor and need it”. HUH?!?!?
AML, if Brendan is such a partisan of the left, who would you call a centrist then? If anything, Brendan’s positions lately seem less like an embrace of the left and more like an opposition to the ridiculousness of the right, similar to his rightward drift during the early part of the Iraq war when the left were acting like a bunch of incoherent idiots.
You might think that your “This is excellent news for John McCain!”-like conservative spinning is coming across as reasonable, but there’s a better word for it: boring. I don’t always know where someone like Christopher Hitchens might come down on an issue, but for you or gahrie or Alasdair, I need only check the latest GOP talking points. For Brendan, I have to check his blog.
Overall I agree with Brendan on this issue. However, that does not mean that reform or improved oversight isn’t necessary, I don’t recall ever arguing that such things were categorically unnecessary. Instead, I believe I talked about a criminal offense that is present if one does indeed milk the system. In other words, there are in-fact existing laws for dealing with abuse. And I wouldn’t argue against them being used against those that would commit fraud or other abuses (though it seems you would?). That the Republicans under Bush gutted the oversight of most of the government and now the Republicans complain that there is a lack of oversight… in the words of AML “HUH?!?!?”
Also, it’s not an ad hominem attack to ask someone if they committed fraud, when their statement is unclear, but certainly implies that they have. You could argue that I’m being flippant in my style of argument, but that wouldn’t be news.
And yes, it is hypocritical to abuse the system and then complain about your tax dollars being wasted on it. By definition. Now if you are working for the unemployment office and you are seeing abuse that you can’t legally stop, then yes it make sense to call for reform to stop the abuse. Also makes sense if you were on unemployment and saw how others were abusing it to complain about waist and argue for reform. To steal and then argue that theft should be dealt with more harshly is, well, hypocritical; unless, of course, you make amends for that theft first. Obviously. You know, it kind of like complaining about people that don’t pay enough in taxes while committing tax fraud.
Re: ease of unemployment “fraud”
dcl, I can only speak to NJ unemployment, since that is the only unemployment I’ve ever collected, but all they require you to do is fill out an online form and click a botton that says that you have been “actively seeking” work and have not turned down work. There are no job application requirements. They don’t even really define what “actively seeking” means. It is incredibly easy to just claim that you’re looking for a job and then sit on your @ss all day watching daytime soaps. For that matter, there’s nothing that says that you have to apply for every job that you become aware of or that might be out there. If the McDonald’s down the street has a “help wanted” sign, there’s nothing in the rules that require you to apply for that job.
“Fraud” and “cheat” are big words. The truth is that people enter unemployement with certain standards as to which jobs they will accept, which geographies they will accept, and which salaries they will accept. If you spend a year looking for a job, but you don’t apply for any job that makes less than $30,000/year and or that’s more than an hour’s commute from you house, you’re not committing fraud and to say that you’re “cheating” is rather strong. But at the same time, you are utilizing unemployment payments to be more selective in your search. Thus the phrase “I can’t find a job” usually comes with caveats, and longer and more generious unemployment benefits allows people to expand those caveats.
kcatnd, who would I call a centrist? this guy.
In any case, I don’t “spin” (certainly not on behalf of John McCain!). I have a definitive weltanschauung that is right-of-center and leans slightly libertarian, and within that framework, I call it as I see it. Unsurprisingly, my take on things tends to line up with others who have similar ideological prisms… but not always. I have no idea what the GOP talking points are, just as I am sure you, David, dcl, and Brendan do not regularly check in to the Dem talking points. Really, that accusation is rather moronic and a total straw-man diversion; if a group of people have a similar ideology, it’s completely rational to expect them to make similar-sounding arguments without any access to common talking points.
Back to Brendan, he is just as left-of-center as the rest of you, and his POV is just as easy to predict as is yours or David’s gahrie’s or Alasdair’s. The qualitative differences in Brendan’s case are these:
1) He does a much better and more thorough job than anyone else on this blog in identifying, weighing, analyzing, and pre-empting his ideological opponents’ arguments and probable counterpoints; and
2) Because he conscientiously does this, he thinks that means he is less partisan, less ideologically striped, and more objective than he really is.
Lastly, I’d just like to point out that the left is still acting like a bunch of incoherent idiots as demonstrated by your comments.
Cartman, fair point.
I would argue that there are other, systematic economic issues we face that are significantly to blame for why people are forced to be more “selective” in what they choose to take. Though in some areas even the job at the local fast food restaurant is taken.
It should not be the case that unemployment pays better than “any” job. In other words it should make better economic sense to take a job that you can find while looking for something more selective then to remain on unemployment. But that isn’t how our economy is structured because unemployment tries to pay out a sufficient amount for people to live on and many jobs that fall under the “any” category do not.
The way we provide health care is an equally problematic issue. Generally you need to find something that has benefits and offers a livable wage to make it logical to go off of unemployment. And, again, all jobs should provide sufficient remuneration to support oneself. And your health insurance shouldn’t be dependent on your employer.
Detaching healthcare and employment would also spur entrepreneurship by reducing the massive risk it takes to start your own business and make people more mobile. Or make it possible for some people who presently works full time to work part time if they want creating more job opportunities for the unemployed, and better quality of life for those that don’t need to work full time, but need healthcare and need some income.
Of course I’m also in favor of tying the minimum wage a company can pay to the maximum wage it pays, and eliminating the minimum wage. At the moment the average fortune 500 CEO makes 885 times minimum wage and 364 times the average American worker. We could set the celling at 100X the lowest paid worker and still make massive improvements for most people working in the US. If I recall correctly Germany sets the celling at 40X, in practice all of Europe has a ratio around 25X. Germany is also doing pretty well through this recession. Correlation doesn’t equal causation, but it is interesting. And lest we say this would make CEOs work less hard, keep in mind the best paid CEOs tend to be at the worst performing companies. Also limiting executive income encourages companies to re-invest in themselves also spurring economic growth.
dcl, another issue is the manner in which collecting unemployment precludes you from taking a temporary or part-time job to increase your income. Suppose you make $5,000 a month in gross salary (~$1,150, but then you lose your job. Unemployment might pay you $461 a week (~$2,000/mo.). Now suppose you can get a part-time job at Home Depot or as a bartender making $300 a week. It’d be nice to add that on top of the unemployment benefit while you wait for a job in your salary range to open up, but instead, they deduct that amount from your unemployment — disincentivizing you from going out and finding a job for that extra income. It’s completely retarded. There ought to be a better way to phase in job income and phase out unemployment benefits to encourage people to at least take part-time or lower salary jobs and put downward pressure on the unemployment rate (not to mention increase tax revenues and lessen the pressure on the fisc).
I do not disagree with anything you’ve pointed out at comment #28. I think it’s inarguable that getting people back on their feet and self sufficient as quickly as possible must be the primary goal of any government social safety net like unemployment. And that we should absolutely look at ways to improve the system. And I think a significant issue is that it is far cheaper to make someone work a 60 or 80 hour work week than it is to hire an additionally part time or full time worker — even if you need to pay time and a half to the worker. the wage isn’t the issue, the per worker overhead many business have–the dark side of greater efficiency as it were–makes it very expensive to hire additional people.
dcl #27 – if it is so easy to be a successful CEO and get “885 times minimum wage and 364 times the average American worker” then why don’t you just do it yourself and donate whatever *you* blieve to be excessive to the poorest-paid workers in your company ?
Don’t forcibly regulate/mandate a ceiling on such things; instead, find ways to make it easier to have the voluntary floor raised/rise …
Again, since you (and your fellow-travelers) seem to believe that the CEOs are not earning their salary, become one – and pay *your* company’s workers what you believe to be a suitable/fair wage/salary … there’s no need for governemnt involvement there … you can do this under current laws and regulations … if it means so much to you, why the $#%#$%# are you pissing and moaning about it rather than doing something about it ?
Oh ? What’s that I hear ? “But … but … but … it’s not that easy to be a successful CEO … ” …
Ah, yessss … the traditional leftie two-stroke imitation …
Which is it, Mr dcl ? Not for all CEOs, but for most of ’em …
Are CEOs charlatans successfully conning a gullible electorate ?
Or …
Are CEOs successful and hard-working individuals conning their Ship carefully to successful destinations and results ?
In the way back when, in Scotland, as a kid, my parents both worked for the UK Department of Employment … my mother worked to help handicapped folk get as full employment as they could handle – and she turned out to be good at it … (her colleagues joked that she could succeed in getting deaf and dumb people hired and kept on as telephone operators) …
The system back then required that those receiving unemployment benefits had to hand in forms, signed by prospective employers to prove that the unemployed person had actually visited the company and applied for a job, but had not succeeded in being hired … that system didn’t completely eliminate unemployment fraud – but it *did* make it a bit harder …
Alasdair, your comment at #30 is basically complete BS. I’d be happy to be the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. Unfortunately, I’m not part of the good old boy skull and bones network. Heck, I’d be willing to take over as CEO for any Fortune 500 company for 1 million dollars a year in total compensation. And be perfectly happy to set the lowest wage the company pays at $40,000 per year for a full time worker. Actually that all seems pretty reasonable doesn’t it?
Where is this “voluntary” floor to come from? No where, It’s bullshit. Business has ALWAYS payed the lowest amount possible to it’s workers to provide those at the top of said business with the most possible money–business has never and will never do the right thing because it’s the right thing without force–and you all think liberals are living in some la la land, how naive is that thought? Because that’s how capitalism works. Full stop. There is no changing that without force. Every pay increase for the bottom earners has required force. Wages started out at $0 with slavery, and eventually business was forced to pay something. Then the Unions forcing business to pay a substantive amount of money that someone could live on to the government forcing a minimum wage.
I have no idea where this pie in the sky idea that business will ever do the “right” thing comes from. It’s bullshit. Corporations make as much money as they can by any means that they can get away with. That’s how it works. So if you want a livable world I’m afraid you have to force companies to behave responsibly. Anyone that would do the right thing because it’s the right thing will never be in a position to do it because a) the actions required to get to those positions are generally not all that ethical and b) you aren’t going to get share holders as much ROI as someone who has fewer ethical scruples. You aren’t going to get any company to do the right thing by playing nice nice with them. And to be perfectly frank, if the average quality of life goes up at the expense of a few million in GDP who the hell cares? Seriously why does GDP matter more than quality of life?
Being the CEO of an extant company is not particularly difficult, what’s hard is starting a new company that grows to the size of a fortune 500 or 100 or 10. That’s really hard, takes a massive amount of creativity and talent. And you know what, the people that do that should make a heck of a lot of money for it. And you know what else, they still would, because they still own the damn company that’s worth millions or billions of dollars–it is an asset they own and are free to sell.
So what exactly is wrong with forcing a company to pay a livable wage? And what’s wrong with tying it to the highest wage earners in the company? It seems much more logical than a minimum wage. After all a ratio is self adjusting for the company depending on the economic situation.
There are days I start to wonder if we couldn’t solve sooooo many problems by getting the crazies of both sides in the Thunderdome. Just sayin’. I mean, who wouldn’t pay money to see Brendan vs. Beck in the “Two man enter, one man leave…” scenario? (Okay, fine, who besides Becky?) Yes, I’m calling you a crazy, because you’ve definitely blew a gasket in your response just like Beck’s being a bit unreasonable in his original statement.
Now, you want to say people who are “discriminated against” or whom are “overqualified” should still get benefits, then I retort with why do they get to spend 8 hours a day chillin’ like villains while my happy a** has to get up and go to work? How about we say, “Any time you’re not at a documented job interview you have to be at a documented, reportable volunteer site”? Finally, as someone who speaks from personal experience, it’s amazing how “Unemployment runs out on Day X, we go broke on Day Y…” will focus one’s mind.
Bottom line: I’m all about helping my fellow man. I am not, however, in favor of said fellow man getting a free lunch. Every hour that I am working / commuting is an hour that I do not get to spend doing something I’d really like to do. It’s not the money being taken from me I have a problem with, it’s the time.
It should not be the case that unemployment pays better than “any” job.
I qualified for $475 a week last year. (I ended up only collecting two weeks and then worked a s a substitute teacher.) That’s better than $10 an hour for a 40 hr work week. How likely do you think it was for people getting a similar amount of money to take a fast food job? Or an entry level job? How many of those 99ers are making $10 an hour in unemployment and not looking for jobs that pay less?
dcl #32 – congratulations on your projectile Projective eructation ! Cuz the BS *you* just typed doesn’t even have anything solid about it !
Most CEOs got to be CEOs by hard work over years … for the big companies, over decades …
So – I repeat my challenge to *you* … since *you* believe it’s so easy to run a company at a profit while paying a ” livable wage”, let’s see you do so …
Me, I know how hard it is to keep a business going (through family connections – “I’m a Mainframe Computer Geek, Jim, not a CEO!”) …
Much more to say than I have time to type right now, but one quick point:
How does acting in your rational self-interest make you a person whom we should be ashamed to call an American? It is, as has been pointed out already, insane that people can make more on unemployment than they can working at menial jobs (all the moreso when health care becomes part of the equation). The system needs to be adjusted to some sort of sliding scale that incentivizes work and makes it possible to still collect some benefits while temporarily working for less than the benefit amount. For instance, if you can make the equivalent of $10 an hour on unemployment with no job, then if you get a $7-an-hour job, perhaps you should, for the remainder of the benefit period, be able to make $4 or $5 per hour from unemployment, perhaps provided you’re still trying to get a better job, or something along those lines. Granted, this is easier said than done, but there has to be some way we can improve the system. The answer is certainly NOT to demonize people who are trying to feed their families and make ends meet, and who, when faced with a fucked-up system that makes no logical sense, make the completely rational choice of making more money by doing nothing than making less money by doing something. The “something vs. nothing” dilemma aside, many people literally can’t afford the pay cut that taking a job in that circumstance would represent! That’s a problem with the system, not a problem with the moral character of the individuals involved.
Alternatively, increase the minimum wage to something a bit more liveable, and then decrease the unemployment benefit amount to be slightly below minimum wage.
Brendan #38 – the minimum wage *is* livable, for a responsible single individual – but not comfortable in most of the country …
And a responsible individual doesn’t just pop out kids until there is a reasonable chance of supporting the entire family …
Minimum wage was never designed to support a family in comfort … nor shoul it *ever* be …
Alternatively, increase the minimum wage to something a bit more liveable,
And then companies increase their prices to pay these increased minimum wages, and suddenly they’re not so livable again………
Hell if increasing the minimum wage is such a great idea, why not just go whole hog and make minimum wage $20 an hour?
Brendan, I think there should be some sort of moral obligation to not be on the public dole. It can’t always be helped, and needing a helping hand once in one’s life is hardly worth condemnation. But, I don’t think that failing to take a $7/hour job when unemployment pays the equivilent of $10 (especially after two whole freaking years) should be viewed as the moral equivilent of finding a great deal on Ebay. I would point to the the inherant moral worth of self-reliance, but even if you don’t believe in that, I would say to you bleeding hearts that staying on unemployment longer than necessary is a socially harmful thing to do as it results in the government taking more of someone else’s hard earned money (ie unemployment insurance “taxes” are raised in order to fund the payouts) or it results in less money being available for the truely needy who can’t even find the hypothetical $7/hour job.
Beck, or anybody else, criticizing people for staying on unemployment for 2 years when they could have found some other job is hardly an @sshole move, and certainly isn’t worthy of the tirade you let loose in your original posting. Now, Beck does intentionally use (arguably unnecessarily) provocative language, but if his criticism is based on the 99ers who can get minimum wage jobs but won’t, then there’s something to it. For Beck to have deserved Brendan’s rant, he would have to have been condemning those who legitimately cannot find any work. I don’t know what percentage of the 99ers are “can’t find any work at any wage”. I’m not even sure if it would be possible to quantify this with any certainty. Based solely on my own experience, anecdotal examples, and my intuition, I’m guessing that the “can’t find any work at any wage” group comprises a material percentage of the 99ers, but the “I would rather be on the dole than take a minimum wage job” group is also material. So within the 99ers, I think there is room for both condemnation as well as compassion.
Also this is the first time in a long time that I’ve participated in an LRT debate, so I’d just like to give a shout out to Jim Kelly and tell you how sorry I am that you never won the Super Bowl.
Regarding the discussion on unemployment benefit levels. Unemployment benefits, like social security, are based upon your wages (with a benefit cap). This makes some sense since the amount you pay into UI is based upon your wages. If you lowered the amount of UI middle and upper income people can receive, without a corresponding decrease in the UI tax, then you would be breaking the “insurance” aspect of unemployment benefits.
Some people believe that part of the reason for UI (besides just keeping you from homelessness and starvation) is to minimize the disruption to a person’s lifestyle and career when they are laid off. Under this theory, it is good that UI allows people who are unemployed to selectively search for jobs. This is because in many professional fields, if you leave the field, it becomes very difficult to get back in. Also given that many (most?) jobs and careers have learning curves and involve human capital (even areas such as construction or low skilled manufacturing). Therefore one could argue that it is best that people stay within their given career and job field if possible so that they can continue to leverage their accumulated human capital. If you buy into the “minimalize disruption” justificaiton of UI you would also want a middle or upper income individual to get a higher unemployment benefits than a lower income person because you don’t want a temporary bout of unemployment to force family to have to suddenly sell their house and move to a rural or ghetto area.
Given that benefits are based on pre-unemployment wage levels and there are fairly loose job search requirements, it would seem that our current unemployment system is based on the “minimalize disruption” justification. However, less I be mistaken as a bleeding heart hippy, I would note that as time goes on, this justification loses its validity. At some point, if you haven’t found a job in your previous career field or in your geographic area, you just have to admit that there is no market for what you are offering, and you have to take whatever else you can get. At some point, the buggy whip maker just has to come to terms with the fact that people don’t want to buy buggy whips and he needs to find something else to do. It sucks and it’s tragic, but at some point, society’s obligation to the selective job seeker diminishes. One can quibble over when exactly society should “cut the chord” so to speak, but 2 years is a pretty long time. If you can’t find work in your desire field after two years of trying, then you should probably expand wage, career field, and geographic horizons.
Good points, Cartman.
I’ve been trying to hold back, but I just can’t help asking: Are you fat, or just big-boned? 😉
Lame attempts at comedy aside, I think unemployment benefits should be run like a true insurance program: Your benefits are calculated based on the premium you pay and how infrequently you are unemployed; and the bennies run out for you based on actuarial realities. Then you could take on a job below what your expectations are and you can decide whether to enjoy the double income, or leave some of the insurance in the program as padding for a future employment calamity or in case the job ends and you become unemployed again.
Cartman #42 …
For the secularist – “Life sucks, and then you die!”
For the believer – “It is the Will of and my Path lies elsewhere !”
(grin)