When House Republicans come back from their long Christmas vacation they'll have a prepared response when the media asks them why their Party has abandoned the long-term unemployed. They'll say that the President bears responsibility for the unemployed because he "hasn't focused on job creation." The fact that this lie can be easily refuted by the President's record is of no particular concern to them; the point is simply to get the media burrowing into Nexis to respond to that issue rather than pushing for an answer to the original question. This is a common GOP tactic and the media fall for it constantly.
Jonathan Chait has a good article in New York Magazine that sheds some light on why Republicans are so eager to deflect questions about their ideas on employment. It's because they don't have any.
Leading the charge against the extension of unemployment benefits to the long-term unemployed are House Republicans like Tom Cole (R-OK). Cole's refrain is a common one--that prior extensions of unemployment benefits were intended as a temporary solution and another extension would gravitate towards establishing them as a permanent "handout."
Chait calls that out for what it is: garbage.
Of course nobody intended for the crisis of mass unemployment to last five years. Nobody intended for the crisis to happen at all. It is simply weird to argue that, since the problem has gone on longer than intended, the response to the problem must end as well. The fire trucks don’t shut off the hoses simply because the fire should have been put out by now.
More importantly, although the GOP's apparent desire to inflict suffering on people their backers frankly don't care about is quite possibly a goal unto itself, on the question of actual solutions to the problem of high unemployment and underemployment the Republican Party has been completely AWOL since the Great Recession began. That's why they're so eager to throw it back on President Obama, even though they're the ones with responsibility to legislate solutions to the nation's problems.
Rand Paul likes to say that receiving unemployment benefits fosters continued unemployment, as if the meager monthly checks are a substitute for a full-time job. In support of his position (which is in reality simply a nasty facet of Libertarianism he'd prefer to disguise) he cites the work of economist Rand Ghayad, author of The Jobless Trap. According to Paul, Ghayad contends that long-term unemployment benefits actually reduce the likelihood of obtaining a job.
But Ghayad himself says Paul is wrong:
Paul misreads my work to try to back up his argument. He says my paper, which shows that companies don't want to hire people who have been unemployed for more than 6 months, proves his point about long-term benefits ...[.] How does he figure this? Well, Paul thinks that "extending long-term benefits will only hurt the chances of the unemployed in the job market," because longer benefits will make them choose to stay unemployed longer—at which point firms won't hire them. But just because companies discriminate against the long-term unemployed doesn't mean long-term benefits are to blame. Paul might know that if he read beyond the first line of my paper's abstract.
Our long-term unemployment trap has nothing to do with long-term benefits....
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There is no evidence in my study, and almost no evidence elsewhere, that cutting unemployment insurance would increase employment much at all. There is some evidence that it would lower the unemployment rate, but only because people would give up looking for work, and no longer count as unemployed. So eliminating benefits...would only cut off a vital lifeline for the long-term unemployed and their families.
Rand Paul is what passes for an intellectual in the Republican Party. The entire highly dubious premise that the GOP has anything whatsoever to say about unemployment rests on his shoulders, since he's one of the few who's even tried to justify their position. And he's dead wrong on a basic point. What does that say?
Chait also takes apart the Wall Street Journal which cheerleads the GOP's position on extension of the unemployment benefits. Their argument is that taking money out of the economy to pay the unemployed will lead to higher interest rates. But thus far that has not happened and interest rates continue to be a historical lows, despite the extensions already allowed by Congress. Likewise, the argument that not extending benefits will prompt the unemployed to search more aggressively for jobs has no applicability in a scenario where the jobs themselves do not exist. He points to North Carolina as a case study:
Republicans in North Carolina proactively demonstrated their party’s stance by cutting off benefits to the unemployed before it was tried elsewhere in the nation. The result was dismal: The state’s labor force is shrinking. Rather than getting jobs, the unemployed have simply stopped looking for them, because they don’t exist.
Ultimately the Republican Party demonstrates no interest in solving the problem of unemployment. Why should they? Their constituency is not made up of people likely to become unemployed. Their constituency resides in corporate boardrooms and is spending the Holiday in the Caribbean. As far as "job creation" is concerned, it doesn't even seem to register on the GOP's radar screen:
There’s an asymmetry of partisan interest on the subject somewhat akin to Benghazi, which obsesses the right and bores the left. Republican thought on mass unemployment is a restaurant with tiny portions that taste terrible.
This disinterest is manifested in the complete absence of job creation as a priority for the Republican agenda, even in the persistent wake of the Great Recession:
The difference is that the Democratic Party also has a policy agenda that is specifically related to the special conditions of high unemployment and low interest rates. The Republicans are still merely asserting that their normal agenda applies just as well now as ever....What they lack is any legislative response to the economic crisis.
Democrats will be mounting a full court press in the next few weeks to reinstate unemployment benefits to those who desperately need them. When the Republicans argue that the "President" should instead focus on job creation, will someone in the corporate media remind them whose job that is?