{"id":36,"date":"2010-07-05T14:41:30","date_gmt":"2010-07-05T19:41:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/keepamericafree.com\/?p=36"},"modified":"2010-07-05T14:41:30","modified_gmt":"2010-07-05T19:41:30","slug":"paul-krugman-on-punishing-the-jobless","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/keepamericafree.com\/index.php\/2010\/07\/05\/paul-krugman-on-punishing-the-jobless\/","title":{"rendered":"Paul Krugman on “Punishing the Jobless”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman published a column in the New York Times on July 4th that relates directly to my posts here of July 2nd and July 4th, namely the votes of Lugar and Hill against extending unemployment benefits for the jobless at a time of national economic crisis.<\/p>\n

Read all of Krugman’s commentary<\/a>, but below I a few paragraphs from the introduction and the summary that say it all.<\/p>\n

\n

Today, American workers face the worst job market since the Great Depression, with five job seekers for every job opening, with the average spell of unemployment now at 35 weeks. Yet the Senate went home for the holiday weekend without extending benefits. How was that possible?<\/p>\n

The answer is that we\u2019re facing a coalition of the heartless, the clueless and the confused. Nothing can be done about the first group, and probably not much about the second. But maybe it\u2019s possible to clear up some of the confusion.
\n…
\nBut won\u2019t extending unemployment benefits worsen the budget deficit? Yes, slightly \u2014 but as I and others have been arguing at length, penny-pinching in the midst of a severely depressed economy is no way to deal with our long-run budget problems. And penny-pinching at the expense of the unemployed is cruel as well as misguided.<\/p>\n

So, is there any chance that these arguments will get through? Not, I fear, to Republicans: \u201cIt is difficult to get a man to understand something,\u201d said Upton Sinclair, \u201cwhen his salary\u201d \u2014 or, in this case, his hope of retaking Congress \u2014 \u201cdepends upon his not understanding it.\u201d But there are also centrist Democrats who have bought into the arguments against helping the unemployed. It\u2019s up to them to step back, realize that they have been misled \u2014 and do the right thing by passing extended benefits. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman published a column in the New York Times on July 4th that relates directly to my posts here of…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[13,28],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/keepamericafree.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/keepamericafree.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/keepamericafree.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/keepamericafree.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/keepamericafree.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/keepamericafree.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/keepamericafree.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/keepamericafree.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/keepamericafree.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}