Unemployment

Most of the article is about some of Rand Paul's idiotic utterances. If you are reading this, you probably already have your mind made up about him.

Plus it costs money to move to a place with more jobs. And it probably wouldn't' do the long-term unemployed any good to do so, because there would still be a lack of enough jobs in the new place just not as dramatically so. And there would be plenty of people looking for work who had been unemployed for a shorter length of time. And employers would be more likely to hire someone from another location who already had a job or had been unemployed a short time than they would to hire a long-term unemployed person from their area.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/12/23/rand-paul-has-some-festivus-grievances-with-washington-the-unemployed-have-some-with-him/

Posted by Ezra Klein on December 23, 2013

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Nationally, there are three job seekers for every one open position. But because unemployment is much higher in some cities than in others, the reality is that most people who've been unemployed for more than 26 weeks live in areas where there are four, five, six, seven and even eight job seekers for each open job. They're not being held back by their unemployment checks. They're being held back by mass unemployment.

The study Paul mentions points toward a real problem: Unemployment is self-perpetuating. Employers discriminate against the long-term unemployed. And so a cycle begins: Someone doesn't get hired because they're unemployed. That extends the length of their unemployment. That makes the next potential employer that much less likely to hire them. That further extends the time they've been unemployed. And so the cycle continues.

This isn't just theory. Northeastern University's Rand Ghayad sent out 4,800 fake resumes to job postings. Some of the resumes were from the new unemployed. Others showed longer spells of unemployment. The callback rate for the long-term unemployed was just 1 to 3 percent. For the newly unemployed, it was 9 to 16 percent.

The problem for the long-term unemployed isn't that their lavish government checks keep them from wanting jobs. It's that they can't get jobs -- in part because they're unemployed. And that makes them even less likely to get jobs in the future. The long-term unemployed are slowly becoming unemployable.

The federal government could move aggressively to put them back to work. It could hire them directly as teacher's aides and park rangers. It could pass a large tax cut for employers who hire new workers and and an even larger one for employers who hire the unemployed. It could invest hundreds of billions in infrastructure repair. Paul could be a powerful advocate if he took up the cause of getting them jobs now so they could get jobs later.

But Paul isn't fighting to do any of that. Instead, he's responding to their plight by cutting off the emergency benefits that are barely keeping them unemployed afloat. He isn't helping the unemployed get jobs. He's abandoning them to joblessness -- and so are a critical mass of his colleagues.