The wages of unemployment
In recent decades there was a steady rise in the employment-to-population ratio: For every 100 working-age Americans, there were eight more workers in 2000 than in 1960. The increase entirely reflects higher female participation in the labor force. Yet in the years since 2000, more than two-thirds of that increase in working-age population employed was erased. …
Why are Americans working less? While there are a number of factors, the phenomenon is due mainly to a variety of public policies that have reduced the incentives to be employed. These policies include:
• Food stamps. Above all else, people work to eat. If the government provides food, then the imperative to work is severely reduced. Since the food-stamp program’s beginning in the 1960s, it has grown considerably, but especially so in the 21st century: There are over 30 million more Americans receiving food stamps today than in 2000. …
• Social Security disability payments. The health of Americans has improved, and the decline in the number of relatively dangerous industrial production and mining jobs should have led to a smaller proportion of Americans unable to work because of disability. Yet the opposite is the case.
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Can I get a big DUH from the audience? Do these people get their news from the internet or from carrier pigeons?
platypus on January 16, 2013 at 10:40 PM
Welcome to da hood………….
dmann on January 16, 2013 at 10:40 PM
Everybody vets ice cream!
tom daschle concerned on January 16, 2013 at 10:53 PM
Food stamps? Really? That’s the problem? I’m not saying that program couldn’t do for some reform, but what, you get maybe a hundred bucks or two a month to eat and that’s going to make you not want to work? You can’t even eat off that.
How about the fact that we carved out our manufacturing base? Or maybe the people who warned us about the sucking sound from NAFTA were at least a little right? Maybe when we say free trade it’s a bit different that what others do?
You know what else happened over that time span? Jobs by the millions were shipped over to China. Or the huge increase in energy costs, which reduces ecnomic output.
No, it’s got to be crap like the government giving poor people a couple hundred bucks a month so they won’t starve…get real.
blue13326 on January 16, 2013 at 11:36 PM
I’ll agree this has a huge impact… are you actually going to oppose green energy, fracking bans, drilling bans, and actually try to make this better?
You’d better get on the left’s butt about this STAT… they’re the ones making sure energy prices keep going up; we’ve got a Secretary of Energy who WANTED Europe priced gasoline after all.
And before you defend the welfare state; and claim it DOESN’T discourage work… try this.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2012-11-27/when-work-punished-tragedy-americas-welfare-state
A single mom with one kid is BETTER OFF with MORE disposable income making $29,000 and getting government benefits than making $69,000.
As for a family?
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/entitlement-america-head-household-making-minimum-wage-has-more-disposable-income-family-mak
But no, there is no problem there… it’s all something else. You should encourage minimum wage workers to stay minimum wage; because making more will be worse for them. That can’t hurt anything.
gekkobear on January 17, 2013 at 12:13 AM
Wrong. In VA, SNAP provides (as of 2009) $526 for a family of three, every month. That assumes $0 monthly “net income” – but there is a whole formula for figuring your net income ($0 doesn’t mean you have no other money flowing in). It also appears you lose about $1 in SNAP for every $3 in income in that column. In that column the money peters out around $1,700+/month – which is nothing to sneeze at for an income.
Bullhockey. If you don’t eat out, you can feed a family of three off a few hundred dollars a month. Now, that will be changing as the economy continues to stagnate, but it’s still true as of now.
You have to actually work at it, though – shop smartly, cook from scratch, and not drink sodas and such. If you spend all that money on cheese doodles and coke zero, it will disappear pretty fast. I could feed my family pretty decently on $526 a month. Heck, it cost me ~$140 for Christmas dinner (including premade desserts) and some extra potatoes and vegetables – which I used to make leftover soup – and it mostly fed my family for two weeks. The ham lasted another week as sandwich material for my kid. (And, if you do the math, $140 is a little more than 1/4 of $526, and it worked out to more than 1/4 of a month’s worth of eating.)
GWB on January 17, 2013 at 2:01 AM
Agreed. He has a better point on SS disability. It is apparently easy to defraud that system.
However, shipping manufacturing jobs overseas is not that bad. It reduces costs for everyone, freeing up capital to be plowed into new companies and new industries. Electronic call switching threw most phone operators out of work but enabled the Internet and cell phones.
A standard Bible is about 1,000 pages long. The federal government by itself puts out 70,000 pages of new regulations every year. If you’re looking for reasons why we don’t have lots of people stepping up to start companies and employ people, perhaps that is a good place to start.
Odysseus on January 17, 2013 at 7:12 AM