This graph from today’s 2014 Economic Report of the President is worth considering.
The current elevation of the unemployment rate is entirely due to long-term unemployment. In December 2013, the unemployment rate for workers unemployed 26 weeks or less fell to lower than its average in the 2001-07 period, while the unemployment rate for workers unemployed 27 weeks or more remained higher than at any time prior to the Great Recession. But the long-term unemployment rate has declined by 1.1 percentage points in the last two years, a steeper decline than the 0.5 percentage point drop in the short-term unemployment rate over that period (Figure 2-24).
The effects of long-term unemployment on our economy are dire – and made worse by each continuing year of government inaction. From the Economix blog:
People who lose jobs, even if they eventually find new ones, suffer lasting damage to their earnings potential, their health and the prospects of their children. And the longer it takes to find a new job, the deeper the damage appears to be. […] A 2010 Pew survey on the experience of long-term unemployment was aptly entitled, “Lost Income, Lost Friends – and Loss of Self-Respect.”
Appallingly, the GOP has chosen to make “cut unemployment! Cut food stamps!” its major policy response to the unemployment crisis, and Democrats seem unable to overcome Republican intransigence.
Hat tip: Wonkblog.
More reading:
Long-term unemployment: Doom.
Even as U.S. economy revives, long-term unemployed face uphill battle – CBS News
10 Reasons That Long-Term Unemployment Is a National Catastrophe | Mother Jones
The American Way of Hiring Is Making Long-Term Unemployment Worse – Gretchen Gavett – Harvard Business Review
Caught in a Revolving Door of Unemployment – NYTimes.com
Study: Longterm Unemployment Has Disastrous Effects On Health And Longevity
You might be offering a more generous interpretation than they deserve, there. It’s no secret that Congressional Democrats are in the pocket of corporate interests every bit as much as Republicans are. We have no working-class party in the U.S.
Well, yes, they are in the corporate pockets, but they still need to be elected so they can sell us out to their masters, and the Democrats have chosen to look amongst the socially disadvantaged for their votes.
So Democrats are more likely to use part of the country’s wealth to court the unemployed, just as the Republicans are more likely to use it to please the rich.
Of course, in this matter, as in so many others, the appearance of wanting to do something is just as good as doing something – after all, see how much more sympathetic Ampersand and his friends are to the plight of the poor Democrats, than to that of their soul-sucking f
riends on the right.Your cynicism is overly simplistic. Reading you two, you’d think Elizabeth Warren or Barbara Mikulski is every bit as pro-corporate as Mitch McConnell, and the only difference is that Warren and Mikulski pretend to think differently from McConnell in order to fool the rubes.
That view isn’t persuasive to me. Being in corporate pockets is, for many pragmatic policy matters, not an either/or but a matter of degree, and someone like Mikulski is FAR less in the pocket than the average Republican senator. Furthermore, how politicians actually act (and vote) matters far more than any alleged secret motivations. (If a Senator votes for a good bill because they’re pandering to the base, that vote counts just as much as a vote that is heartfelt.)
I’ve criticized the Democrats a lot of times, on my blog and in my cartoons, and no doubt will do so again. Nonetheless, I’m more sympathetic to the Democrats because they do, in fact, push for and (occasionally) pass better policies.
Obamacare, flawed as it is, is making it a lot more affordable for me and many other low-income folks to get medical care. I’m unhappy that unemployment insurance has stopped being extended, but without the Democrats it would have stopped being extended years ago, and that’s been an economic lifeline for many families. Ditto for food stamps. Ditto for Obama’s executive order making it harder for employers to cheat workers out of overtime pay.
I don’t think you can intelligently discuss policy if you choose not to acknowledge reality, whether it’s Republicans who deny global warming, or political independents (or far left-wingers) who pretend there is no consequential difference between the two parties.