Michelle Malkin’s crazy unemployment theory debunked by the economist she quotes
Leaving aside the question of what the ABC News “This Week” bookers are smoking these days, having already booked of all people Karl Rove, and now crackpot right wing blogger Michelle Malkin as panelists on the once vaunted “round table” (on which George Will, Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts normally sit) we now have the official Malkin Doctrine on unemployment. It goes like this: the $200-300 a week jobless Americans are receiving in unemployment benefits is a big, fat incentive to stay unemployed. I mean, how great is it to go from a $40,000 $50,000, $60,000 or $100,000 paycheck to the equivalent of $7 bucks an hour? With that kind of dough rolling in, you can just kick back, crack open a can of spam and not be able to afford your mortgage OR your car note for as long as the guvment is putting out! Sweet!
The Atlanta Journal Constitution’s Cynthia Tucker tried to explain to Ms. Malkin that when a posting for 20 jobs produces 6,000 applicants, as is happening routinely around the country, people aren’t lazy, or unemployed by choice, or chowing down on tasty “government cheese” as the classy Ms. Malkin termed unemployment aid, they’re — wait for it — unable to find a job because there aren’t many jobs out there. (Tucker was kind enough not to add the word “dummy,” so I’ll do it for her.)
Malkin tried to pawn off her crackerjack theory of lavish unemployment aid keeping people lazy and soft on a former Clinton administration economist, “Larry” Katz — something she’s been selling for months on her blog, every time the notion of extending unemployment benefits comes up. In January, she wrote:
A program intended to be a safety net has become an excuse for people to remain unemployed once they lose a job by discouraging job search activities until benefits are almost exhausted. [The other panelists just looked at Malkin like she was insane for most of the segment. Poor Jerry Seib from the WSJ looked like he wanted to crawl under the table.]
Even the Clinton administration apparently understood the perverse consequences:
The two links provided in the above post clip? Neither will take you to anything written by Lawrence Katz (maybe she knows him well enough to call him Larry, but I don’t,) who now teaches economics at Harvard. Rather, she links to the right wing National Center for Policy Analysis think tank, which specializes in, among other things, debunking global warming, pushing for the privatization of Social Security, and stopping healthcare reform (its credits include the phony British healthcare system-cancer link meme and the new tack: that reforming healthcare will kill your granny), and Fox News. Worse, the Fox News link wasn’t even to a news story. It was to an op-ed opposing the passage of the stimulus package back in January.
Malkin tried to represent herself as a jourlaist on the “This Week” panel, rather than an activist. But our crack journo has yet to actually quote Mr. Katz himself, who has written several scholarly papers on the theoretical issues of compensation, employment and unemployment, or to interview him, in her capacity “covering” the issues, as she also claimed. Well, an actual journalist, working, as it happens, for the New York Times, did bother, and this is what Erik Eckholm came up with, in an article that coincidentally, ran in TODAY’s paper:
Traditionally, many economists have been leery of prolonged unemployment benefits because they can reduce the incentive to seek work. But that should not be a concern now because jobs remain so scarce, said Lawrence Katz, a labor economist at Harvard.
For every job that becomes available, about six people are looking, Dr. Katz said. “Unemployment insurance gives income to families who are really suffering and can’t find work even if they are hustling to look,” he said.
With the economy still listing, he added, a temporary extension can provide a quick fiscal stimulus. And, Dr. Katz said, when people exhaust unemployment and health insurance, many end up applying for disability benefits, which become a large, unending drain on the Treasury.
Oops… Kind of begs the question, how a person can make a living on the Internet, and yet not know how to Google.
Watch the roundtable here.
Related: ThinkProgress breaks down the Malkin-called “counterinsurgency.”
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Michelle Malkin is one of the worst examples of how an idiot can rise to the top of the rightwing intelligensia. She is angry and uninformed, and there is clearly some kind of emotional problem at work here (look at her eyes rolling around as she excites herself by insulting unemployed people). Sad, more than anything else. Very sad.
Agreed. She’s nuts. So how did she get on ABC?
Unemployment rate has become a political football anyway. It means nothing anymore. The “official” rate is a cruel joke.
The real disaster is that the Fed has begun to monetize our debt. That’s insane, but they’ve just begun to do it.
John.