by Jordan Eizenga
…research by the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank has found that the current link between high UI benefits and poor job search efforts is weak. Researchers found that unemployed workers who qualify for UI benefits have been unemployed for only 1.6 weeks longer than those who do not qualify for such benefits. This suggests that the persistently high level of unemployment is not so much a function of labor supply, but rather labor demand. In other words, workers are willing to work, but employers are not very interested in hiring them.
Yep, yep, yep, a thousand times: YEP. While it’s always convenient and even mildly masturbatory to blame the victim, the fact is people want to work. And, like the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy, the Welfare Queen with Her Cadillac is was and always will have been a figment of Reagan and the right wing’s id-maginations.
Sorry, but it’s true.
Lemkin 