Opinion: Is GOP Too Tough on the Unemployed?

(March 9) -- Writer Michael Kinsley once defined a "gaffe" in Washington as when a politician accidentally tells the truth. By that definition, Republicans have been particularly gaffe prone when it comes to unemployment.

Over the past couple of weeks, various Republicans have complained that extending unemployment insurance will worsen the nation's unemployment picture. The issue got rolling when Sen. Jim Bunning, R-Ky., set up a one-man blockade of a $10 billion bill to extend unemployment insurance benefits, but several GOP lawmakers have picked up the ball.

Sunday on CNN, former Rep. Tom DeLay, R-Texas, said there's "an argument to be made that these extensions of these unemployment benefits keeps people from going and finding jobs."

Earlier in the month, Sen. John Kyl, R-Ariz., said on the Senate floor that unemployment insurance "doesn't create new jobs. In fact, if anything, continuing to pay people unemployment compensation is a disincentive for them to seek new work."

Since then, bloggers have been scraping the Internet for other examples of Republicans who, as one put it, "don't like the unemployed." And they found that Rep. Dean Heller, R-Nev., wondered "Is the government now creating hobos?" and Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, said that we "shouldn't turn the 'safety net' into a hammock."

All of it fits a standard trope about Republicans for being, as CNN's Candy Crowley put it, "an angry party of white men who don't really care about the unemployed or the uninsured."

Only problem is that Republicans appear to be right. Several published economic studies over the years have shown a connection between the length of unemployment insurance and how long someone is out of work. Examples:

• A study published by Cornell University's Industrial and Labor Relations Review in January looked at 50 years of data for two nearby cities and found generous unemployment insurance had "substantial effects" on how long people were out of work.
• A 2007 study in the American Economic Review looked at the effects in Austria and found that "dramatically extended benefits led to a longer duration of unemployment and reduced the transitions to new jobs."
• A 2003 study found that roughly a third of unemployed workers find a new job almost immediately once their benefits expire -- both when unemployment is high and when it's low.
• A 1991 National Bureau of Economic Research paper found that "higher UI benefits are found to have a strong negative effect on the probability of leaving unemployment."
• A 1990 paper published by the NBER found that "policies that extend the potential duration of benefits increase the mean duration of unemployment."

Meanwhile, the classic Paul Krugman-authored economics textbook, "Macroeconomics," has this to say: "Public policy designed to help workers who lose their jobs can lead to structural unemployment as an unintended side effect." The book goes on to note that Europe's more generous unemployment insurance has led to the "persistent high unemployment that affects a number of European countries."

Krugman, a New York Times columnist, now claims that times are so bad that this rule doesn't apply -- "anyone who thinks that high unemployment in the first quarter of 2010 has anything to do with workers getting excessively generous benefits must not get out much" -- although he doesn't cite specific research to support this.

Whatever the case, Republicans would probably do well to heed the Good Book's lesson that "to everything there is a season." And this certainly ain't the season for trying to teach the unemployed and their struggling families a hard lesson in economics.


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