By Guest Blogger Dave Carter
(Dave Carter is a contributor on Ricochet.com, a retired military veteran, and current long haul truck driver.)
This will be a little like eating ice cream too fast and suffering a brain freeze, but stay with me here, okay? <deep breath> According to Nancy Pelosi, an extension of unemployment insurance benefits will add 600,000 jobs. How do we know, you ask? Because, she answers, “The unemployment insurance extension is not only good for individuals. It has a macroeconomic impact. As macroeconomic advisers have stated, it would make a difference of 600,000 jobs to our economy.” And just who are these “macroeconomic advisors,” you wonder? Beats the stew beef out of me and Nancy didn’t say. But that’s not important now. What is important is what Nancy said, namely, “Again this is important because this is about the safety net not just for these individuals, but for our economic system that, in times of unemployment, we have a safety net and that is important.” Got it?
So again, it is important to understand that when you pay unemployment benefits with money extracted from the productive sector and given to the unproductive sector, it creates jobs because the unemployed will buy stuff from businesses who had to lay employees off because they couldn’t pay them after having their money confiscated by the government so it could pay more money to formerly employed people to go out and buy stuff, see? Now if only we could get enough people on unemployment, we could generate a real economic boom and lower unemployment by means of,….more unemployed people buying things with money extracted from employed people…. my head is hurting. “Again,” saith Nancy, ” [not only] a safety net for individuals, but a safety net for the economy …and again this money when received is immediately spent, it’s urgently needed, and injects demand into the economy, creating jobs.” On second thought, I think the only way unemployment will boost the economy is if it is people like Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama who are unemployed.
