Two Americas

[Content Note: Class warfare; bootstraps rhetoric.]

Or what feels, truly, like two different planets, sometimes. The planet on which people live who understand the reality of being unemployed in the US, and the planet on which Republicans live. Paul Krugman:

Last week John Boehner, the speaker of the House, explained to an audience at the American Enterprise Institute what's holding back employment in America: laziness. People, he said, have "this idea" that "I really don't have to work. I don't really want to do this. I think I'd rather just sit around." Holy 47 percent, Batman!

It's hardly the first time a prominent conservative has said something along these lines. Ever since a financial crisis plunged us into recession it has been a nonstop refrain on the right that the unemployed aren't trying hard enough, that they are taking it easy thanks to generous unemployment benefits, which are constantly characterized as "paying people not to work." And the urge to blame the victims of a depressed economy has proved impervious to logic and evidence.

But it's still amazing — and revealing — to hear this line being repeated now. For the blame-the-victim crowd has gotten everything it wanted: Benefits, especially for the long-term unemployed, have been slashed or eliminated.

...I don't know how many people realize just how successful the campaign against any kind of relief for those who can't find jobs has been. But it's a striking picture. ...[E]xtended benefits for the long-term unemployed have been eliminated — and in some states the duration of benefits has been slashed even further.

The result is that most of the unemployed have been cut off. Only 26 percent of jobless Americans are receiving any kind of unemployment benefit, the lowest level in many decades. The total value of unemployment benefits is less than 0.25 percent of G.D.P., half what it was in 2003, when the unemployment rate was roughly the same as it is now. It's not hyperbole to say that America has abandoned its out-of-work citizens.

I strongly recommend reading the whole thing.

The people who constantly bray this fairy tale of lazy moochers who cruise through life on government benefits are so out of touch with multiple realities—how difficult it is to secure long-term payments (e.g. disability); how difficult it is to live on government welfare; how many people who desperately need welfare aren't getting it because they don't qualify; how many people are desperate for work they can do; how many places in the US simply don't have enough jobs with livable wages to support the community anymore—that their ignorance, willful or otherwise, would be laughable if it weren't so unfathomably harmful.

And then there is this: Poverty is extremely difficult. It is stressful, demoralizing, exhausting. Poverty is not for lazy people. No one is getting rich, or even living a carefree life, on the paltry sums that constitute government benefits in the US.

The only lazy people in this discussion are the ones who repeat ad nauseam the reprehensible lie that unemployed people are shiftless takers, because that's a hell of a lot easier than just admitting their theory that making life difficult for unemployed people will force them to "get a job" is rank garbage.

Like the rest of their fantastical contentions underwriting their contemptible policies.

[Related Reading: $10.10.]