Unemployment Benefits Reach a New Low

Thinking some more about John Boehner’s resurrection of the notion that we’re suffering weak job growth because people are living the good life on government benefits, and don’t want to work. It has long seemed to me that the issue of unemployment benefits is where the debate over economic policy in a depression reaches its purest essence. If you’r on the right, you believe — you more or less have to believe — that unemployment benefits hurt job creation, because you’re “paying people not to work.” To admit that depression conditions are different, that the economy is suffering from an overall lack of demand and that putting money into the pockets of people likely to spend it would increase employment, would mean admitting that the free market sometimes fails badly. And of course disdain for the unemployed helps a lot if you want to oppose any kind of aid for the unfortunate.