Being a San Francisco liberal means never having to say youre sorry. Or wrong. Take Nancy Pelosi please.
Five years ago Californias genius Bay Area Democrat declared that government unemployment checks generate job growth. Yes really. Let me say about unemployment insurance she told reporters this is one of the biggest stimuluses (sic) to our economy. Economists will tell you this money is spent quickly. It injects demand into the economy and is job creating.
She babbled on: It creates jobs faster than almost any other initiative you can name because again it is money that is needed for families to survive and it is spent. So it has a double benefit. It helps those whove lost their jobs but it also is a job creator.
What Crazy-Cakes Pelosi failed to mention however is the long-established conclusion of labor economists from all parts of the political spectrum that extending unemployment insurance benefits prolongs unemployment. While she heralded the short-term effects on consumer spending she ignored the blindingly obvious: Outside the land of progressive make-believe workers respond to incentives. Over the long term subsidizing joblessness creates more of it.
I bring this all up because a new paper from the venerable nonpartisan National Bureau of Economic Research concludes that the recent job gains Pelosi and the Democrats are now crowing about may be due to the very policy they fought so hard against: ending extended unemployment benefits.
We find that a 1 percent drop in benefit duration leads to a statistically significant increase of employment by 0.0161 log points the NBER economists reported. In practical terms it means that 1.8 million additional jobs were created in 2014 due to the benefit cut. Take note: Almost 1 million of these jobs were filled by workers from out of the labor force who would not have participated in the labor market had benefit extensions been reauthorized.
The jobs bump coincided with the expiration of the 99-week UI benefits extension passed as part of the Obama stimulus package. Remember: Laid-off workers were already collecting up to 79 weeks of unemployment in half of the states before the last extension. Democrats were pushing for yet another 13-week extension that would have cost tens of billions of dollars more. The cost of the joint federal-state program is borne by employers who pay state and federal taxes on a portion of wages paid to each employee in a calendar year.
Remarkably the NBER analysis attributed 61 percent of the aggregate employment growth in 2014 to the congressional cutoff in unemployment benefits at the end of 2013. Heres the NBER teams bottom line for Pelosi and her fellow unemployment benefits cheerleaders: The findings in this paper imply that the negative effects of unemployment benefit extensions on employment far outweigh the potential stimulative effects often ascribed to this policy.
This vindication comes after a hyperbolic campaign by Democrats accusing Republicans of meanness and obstruction for opposing temporary unemployment benefits that have become enshrined permanently.
But its not just partisan hacks in Washington whove so falsely demonized those opposed to endless unemployment checks as a job creation vehicle. During the contentious debate over extending UI checks as part of the Obama stimulus in 2009 I argued on an ABC This Week with George Stephanopoulos panel If you put enough government cheese in front of people they are just going to keep eating it. Atlanta Journal-Constitution columnist Cynthia Tucker took offense mischaracterizing standard economic arguments for moral judgment. Does the right really believe the unemployed are lazy? she wailed.
The left-leaning journalism outfit at PolitiFact jumped on board rating my 100 percent-true reference to decades of labor economics literature on UIs impact on joblessness half-true. And the George Soros-funded hitmen of Media Matters called me and several other conservatives reality-deniers for stating the bloody obvious about UIs warped incentives -- even though their favorite progressive economist Paul Krugman acknowledged that everyone agrees that really generous unemployment benefits by reducing the incentive to seek jobs can raise the NAIRU (the minimum rate of unemployment consistent with a stable inflation rate).
The politicians posing as economy-healers and the political operatives posing as journalists will no doubt find clever ways to slice dice and explain away the latest NBER findings. But this simple truth endures: Government dependency doesnt create jobs. It kills them.
Michelle Malkin is the author of Culture of Corruption: Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats Crooks & Cronies (Regnery 2010).
Being a San Francisco liberal means never having to say youre sorry. Or wrong. Take Nancy Pelosi please.
Five years ago Californias genius Bay Area Democrat declared that government unemployment checks generate job growth. Yes really. Let me say about unemployment insurance she told reporters this is one of the biggest stimuluses (sic) to our economy. Economists will tell you this money is spent quickly. It injects demand into the economy and is job creating.
She babbled on: It creates jobs faster than almost any other initiative you can name because again it is money that is needed for families to survive and it is spent. So it has a double benefit. It helps those whove lost their jobs but it also is a job creator.
What Crazy-Cakes Pelosi failed to mention however is the long-established conclusion of labor economists from all parts of the political spectrum that extending unemployment insurance benefits prolongs unemployment. While she heralded the short-term effects on consumer spending she ignored the blindingly obvious: Outside the land of progressive make-believe workers respond to incentives. Over the long term subsidizing joblessness creates more of it.
I bring this all up because a new paper from the venerable nonpartisan National Bureau of Economic Research concludes that the recent job gains Pelosi and the Democrats are now crowing about may be due to the very policy they fought so hard against: ending extended unemployment benefits.
We find that a 1 percent drop in benefit duration leads to a statistically significant increase of employment by 0.0161 log points the NBER economists reported. In practical terms it means that 1.8 million additional jobs were created in 2014 due to the benefit cut. Take note: Almost 1 million of these jobs were filled by workers from out of the labor force who would not have participated in the labor market had benefit extensions been reauthorized.
The jobs bump coincided with the expiration of the 99-week UI benefits extension passed as part of the Obama stimulus package. Remember: Laid-off workers were already collecting up to 79 weeks of unemployment in half of the states before the last extension. Democrats were pushing for yet another 13-week extension that would have cost tens of billions of dollars more. The cost of the joint federal-state program is borne by employers who pay state and federal taxes on a portion of wages paid to each employee in a calendar year.
Remarkably the NBER analysis attributed 61 percent of the aggregate employment growth in 2014 to the congressional cutoff in unemployment benefits at the end of 2013. Heres the NBER teams bottom line for Pelosi and her fellow unemployment benefits cheerleaders: The findings in this paper imply that the negative effects of unemployment benefit extensions on employment far outweigh the potential stimulative effects often ascribed to this policy.
This vindication comes after a hyperbolic campaign by Democrats accusing Republicans of meanness and obstruction for opposing temporary unemployment benefits that have become enshrined permanently.
But its not just partisan hacks in Washington whove so falsely demonized those opposed to endless unemployment checks as a job creation vehicle. During the contentious debate over extending UI checks as part of the Obama stimulus in 2009 I argued on an ABC This Week with George Stephanopoulos panel If you put enough government cheese in front of people they are just going to keep eating it. Atlanta Journal-Constitution columnist Cynthia Tucker took offense mischaracterizing standard economic arguments for moral judgment. Does the right really believe the unemployed are lazy? she wailed.
The left-leaning journalism outfit at PolitiFact jumped on board rating my 100 percent-true reference to decades of labor economics literature on UIs impact on joblessness half-true. And the George Soros-funded hitmen of Media Matters called me and several other conservatives reality-deniers for stating the bloody obvious about UIs warped incentives -- even though their favorite progressive economist Paul Krugman acknowledged that everyone agrees that really generous unemployment benefits by reducing the incentive to seek jobs can raise the NAIRU (the minimum rate of unemployment consistent with a stable inflation rate).
The politicians posing as economy-healers and the political operatives posing as journalists will no doubt find clever ways to slice dice and explain away the latest NBER findings. But this simple truth endures: Government dependency doesnt create jobs. It kills them.
Michelle Malkin is the author of Culture of Corruption: Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats Crooks & Cronies (Regnery 2010).
