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Politics : Just the Facts, Ma'am: A Compendium of Liberal Fiction -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sully- who wrote (78599)	3/23/2010 10:17:55 PM
From: Sully-	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 90947

Welfare Un-Reform IBD Editorials Posted 06:50 PM ET The Dole: In urging Congress to extend jobless benefits again, the White House warned that unemployment could remain high through the year. Benefits may be part of the problem. In a joint statement to Congress, the president's top economic advisers hedged against expectations of lower unemployment this year, saying the jobless rate — still hovering around 10% — will "remain elevated for an extended period." "We do not expect further declines in unemployment this year," the White House budget director, top economist and Treasury secretary testified. What's got them so pessimistic? Possibly an abnormally high job vacancy rate. Normally the job vacancy rate goes down after a recession, as the job market stabilizes. But January, the latest reported month, showed an 11% spike in unfilled jobs. Vacancies are now at 2.1% — the highest since February 2009, the Labor Department says. That means people are not taking jobs as expected at this point in the recovery. Why? Because many don't have to — thanks in part to 99 weeks and counting of unemployment benefits. Add to that record food stamp payments and other welfare, and the unemployed have been perversely incentivized to keep holding out for better jobs, rather than take less-than-desirable or lower-paying ones. Forty percent of jobless Americans have been out of work for at least 27 weeks — the highest level since the government began keeping records in the 1940s. "Those programs subsidize unemployment," University of Chicago economist Robert Shimer says. "There could be good reasons to do it, but we should be clear on the cost. It has a pretty substantial impact." Generous jobless benefits alone account for as much as 1.5 points of the nation's 9.7% jobless rate, Shimer reckons. There are also new incentives for Americans to go on the dole permanently, thanks to a provision in the stimulus package that includes a $5 billion emergency fund for states to meet demand for more welfare assistance. The administration is expanding that supposedly temporary fund an additional $2.5 billion. The fund matches states 80 cents on the dollar for each new welfare case, making it more generous than the old Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) system. In effect, Obama is paying states a bonus to sign up new welfare recipients. This reverses the historic 1996 welfare reform, which took more than 2.7 million families off the dole by making welfare truly temporary under the new Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program. TANF lowered the poverty rate for black children as a record number of single mothers learned skills and took jobs. Fixed block grants to states ended Washington paying states on a per-capita basis for every person who entered the welfare rolls. New succor doesn't stop there. Socialized medicine threatens to add 15 million uninsured to the Medicaid rolls, which are already bloated from the recession. Working Americans with household income well above the poverty line will be eligible for a program once reserved only for the poor. Overall, ObamaCare represents the biggest federal entitlement since Medicare and Medicaid were passed in the '60s. Obama is overturning the welfare reform signed by his Democrat predecessor and is rapidly rebuilding the welfare state. If more and more go on the dole instead of filling jobs that are starting to open up, it will only stall the recovery and widen the deficit. If unemployment "remains elevated for an extended period," it's because Democrats at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue extended unemployment and welfare benefits while refusing to incentivize small businesses — the job engine of the economy — to take risks and staff up. If Democrats lose Congress in November over chronic unemployment and record deficits, they have only themselves — and the head of their party — to blame. .