SSDD
Parade magazine, that bastion of all that is wonderful in America, tells us this weekend of a Georgia (where else?) programme that would oblige the unemployed to work for their benefits. The magazine's online poll currently shows that readers agree with the idea by a margin of 57 to 43 percent. As of Monday, the neanderthals who support the idea are getting some sharp pushback from unemployed professionals who, like, me, think it's idiotic.
It's a perfect conservative concept. The employer pays unemployment compensation insurance, which in theory is supposed to provide a disincentive to layoffs as well as a fund to keep unemployed workers contributing to the economy with such extravagances as food, rent and job hunting expenses.
Well hell, that worked well, didn't it?
Georgia's plan would still have employers pay the insurance that isn't enough to make mass layoffs too costly an option for regular use. Then, they get to have the same workers back for nothing and with no commitment to hire them back. The idea of course is the old canard that all unemployed workers are out of work because they are shiftless bums.
The numbers show who really benefits. Turning Parade's trumpeting around, one notes that nearly half the unemployed under this plan are still unemployed. How many employers do we think will take advantage, indefinitely, of workers that they do not have to pay?
Suppose we try an alternative that has made sense to me for nearly 40 years. Have employers pay unemployment insurance that makes layoffs save at the last extremity a ruinously expensive proposition. Give them a refund if they rehire these workers (layoff originally implied laying back on). Give them another credit for hiring people who are on unemployment. Make them say why they haven't taken advantage of these benefits.
Georgia's plan used to be called serfdom, and the label still fits.
It's a perfect conservative concept. The employer pays unemployment compensation insurance, which in theory is supposed to provide a disincentive to layoffs as well as a fund to keep unemployed workers contributing to the economy with such extravagances as food, rent and job hunting expenses.
Well hell, that worked well, didn't it?
Georgia's plan would still have employers pay the insurance that isn't enough to make mass layoffs too costly an option for regular use. Then, they get to have the same workers back for nothing and with no commitment to hire them back. The idea of course is the old canard that all unemployed workers are out of work because they are shiftless bums.
The numbers show who really benefits. Turning Parade's trumpeting around, one notes that nearly half the unemployed under this plan are still unemployed. How many employers do we think will take advantage, indefinitely, of workers that they do not have to pay?
Suppose we try an alternative that has made sense to me for nearly 40 years. Have employers pay unemployment insurance that makes layoffs save at the last extremity a ruinously expensive proposition. Give them a refund if they rehire these workers (layoff originally implied laying back on). Give them another credit for hiring people who are on unemployment. Make them say why they haven't taken advantage of these benefits.
Georgia's plan used to be called serfdom, and the label still fits.
Labels: Parade magazine, unemployment
posted by Uncle | 00:22
2 Comments:
I love this state! OK, the *state* is okay, its the laws and those that make them that crack me up. So many backwards things.
Another Georgia governor, Joe Brown, was famed for his out-of-the-box thinking. At the start of the Civil War, he ordered that the state's troops be equipped with spears instead of firearms. Georgia should be happy that more conventional thinkers prevailed, otherwise they would have no gene pool at all. Wait...maybe we should wish Brown had had his way?
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