The GOP's Agenda to Punish the Poor and Unemployed

As we move into the midst of the holiday season, thoughts tend to run to family and also assistance for the poor as all manner of charity efforts from "Toys for Tots" to clothing drives move into full swing.  It's a time of year when at least in theory Christian values and concern for the less fortunate ought to dominate.  But not so with Congressional Republicans.  While the blather about Christian values during stump speeches pandering to Christofascists and in sound bites, their legislative agenda is the antithesis of Christian values.  Their goal: punish the poor and unemployed and make their lives even more desperate.  A column in the New York Times looks at this foul agenda.  Here are some excerpts:

Six years have passed since the United States economy entered the Great Recession, four and a half since it officially began to recover, but long-term unemployment remains disastrously high. And Republicans have a theory about why this is happening. Their theory is, as it happens, completely wrong. But they’re sticking to it — and as a result, 1.3 million American workers, many of them in desperate financial straits, are set to lose unemployment benefits at the end of December. 

Merry Christmas. 

Now, the G.O.P.’s desire to punish the unemployed doesn’t arise solely from bad economics; it’s part of a general pattern of afflicting the afflicted while comforting the comfortable (no to food stamps, yes to farm subsidies). But ideas do matter — as John Maynard Keynes famously wrote, they are “dangerous for good or evil.” And the case of unemployment benefits is an especially clear example of superficially plausible but wrong economic ideas being dangerous for evil.

 Here’s the world as many Republicans see it: Unemployment insurance . . . . reduces the incentive to search for a new job. As a result, the story goes, workers stay unemployed longer.

Correspondingly, the G.O.P. answer to the problem of long-term unemployment is to increase the pain of the long-term unemployed: Cut off their benefits, and they’ll go out and find jobs. How, exactly, will they find jobs when there are three times as many job-seekers as job vacancies? Details, details. 

On the contrary, unemployment benefits help create jobs, and cutting those benefits would depress the economy as a whole. 

[E]employment in today’s American economy is limited by demand, not supply. Businesses aren’t failing to hire because they can’t find willing workers; they’re failing to hire because they can’t find enough customers. And slashing unemployment benefits — which would have the side effect of reducing incomes and hence consumer spending — would just make the situation worse. 

[T]he odds, I’m sorry to say, are that the long-term unemployed will be cut off, thanks to a perfect marriage of callousness — a complete lack of empathy for the unfortunate — with bad economics. But then, hasn’t that been the story of just about everything lately?