Another Republican lie about unemployment benefits Debunked

Tony Thompson,

Republicans love to talk about how the poor are lazy moochers who won’t get off their asses and get jobs (not true), that they’re poor because they don’t work hard enough, or are drug addled miscreants who need to be tested before they get benefits (methinks we should be testing politicians if anyone’s to get tested).  No matter how many times these talking points are debunked, they continue to exist. They’re memetic vampires.  Or zombies.  With no heads.

One of their favorite talking points is that granting benefits to poor people makes them lazy and disinclined to get a job.  A new study from Regis Barnichon of the Centre de Recerca en Economia Internacional in Barcelona and Andrew Figura of the Federal Reserve Board shows that…wait for it…wait for it…

That’s just another myth about the poor!

While far from the only Republican objection to an extension of unemployment benefits, one of the primary arguments was that the very existence of unemployment insurance itself was part of what caused unemployment. Despite the fact that there were as many as three jobseekers in the U.S. for every open position, Republicans commonly argued that if only unemployment benefits were cut, people would go out and find work.

The recent study by Regis Barnichon of the Centre de Recerca en Economia Internacional in Barcelona and Andrew Figura of the Federal Reserve Board, finds that the impact of extended benefits on unemployment is quite small — on the order of one-third of one percent — and that it has no discernible effect on labor force participation rates.

To be sure, the study did find that the benefits extension (which they refer to as Emergency and Extended unemployment Benefits, or EEB) increased levels of unemployment. But the small size of the increase, given the high levels of unemployment in the country during the time in question, argues against the wisdom of wholesale benefits cuts.

“We estimate that [EEB] had non-negligible effects on the unemployment rate in recent years,” the authors write about the benefits extension. “At the same time, because EEB has very little effect on the behavior of the relatively large share of individuals who are at the beginning of their unemployment spells, the overall effect of EEB on the unemployment rate is fairly modest; at its peak (in terms of the average number of benefit weeks provided) EEB boosted the unemployment rate by one-third percentage point.”

Further, they determined that “the effect of EEB on the [labor] participation rate is estimated to have been quite small.”

(via Daily Kos)

I’m sure that once Republicans hear this news, they’ll stop telling this myth.

Really. I have the utmost confidence.

It’s set to happen just after they accept a woman’s right to an abortion.  Any minute now.

{advertisement}
Another Republican lie about unemployment benefits Debunked

About the author

{advertisement}

One thought on “Another Republican lie about unemployment benefits Debunked”

Comments are closed.