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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/22/opinion/paul-krugman-those-lazy-jobless.html?_r=0
Last week John Boehner, the speaker of the House, explained
to an audience at the American Enterprise Institute what’s holding back
employment in America: laziness. People, he said, have “this idea” that
“I really don’t have to work. I don’t really want to do this. I think
I’d rather just sit around.” Holy 47 percent, Batman!
It’s
hardly the first time a prominent conservative has said something along
these lines. Ever since a financial crisis plunged us into recession it
has been a nonstop refrain on the right that the unemployed aren’t
trying hard enough, that they are taking it easy thanks to generous
unemployment benefits, which are constantly characterized as “paying
people not to work.” And the urge to blame the victims of a depressed
economy has proved impervious to logic and evidence.
But
it’s still amazing — and revealing — to hear this line being repeated
now. For the blame-the-victim crowd has gotten everything it wanted:
Benefits, especially for the long-term unemployed, have been slashed or
eliminated. So now we have rants against the bums on welfare when they
aren’t bums — they never were — and there’s no welfare. Why
First
things first: I don’t know how many people realize just how successful
the campaign against any kind of relief for those who can’t find jobs
has been. But it’s a striking picture. The job market has improved
lately, but there are still almost three million
Americans who have been out of work for more than six months, the usual
maximum duration of unemployment insurance. That’s nearly three times
the pre-recession total. Yet extended benefits for the long-term
unemployed have been eliminated — and in some states the duration of
benefits has been slashed even further.
The result is that most of the unemployed have been cut off. Only 26 percent of jobless Americans are receiving any kind of unemployment benefit, the lowest level in many decades. The total value
of unemployment benefits is less than 0.25 percent of G.D.P., half what
it was in 2003, when the unemployment rate was roughly the same as it
is now. It’s not hyperbole to say that America has abandoned its
out-of-work citizens.
Strange
to say, this outbreak of anti-compassionate conservatism hasn’t
produced a job surge. In fact, the whole proposition that cruelty is the
key to prosperity hasn’t been faring too well lately. Last week Nathan
Deal, the Republican governor of Georgia, complained that many states
with Republican governors have seen a rise in unemployment and suggested that the feds were cooking the books. But maybe the right’s preferred policies don’t work?
That
is, however, a topic for another column. My question for today is
instead one of psychology and politics: Why is there so much animus
against the unemployed, such a strong conviction that they’re getting
away with something, at a time when they’re actually being treated with
unprecedented harshness?
Now,
as anyone who has studied British policy during the Irish famine knows,
self-righteous cruelty toward the victims of disaster, especially when
the disaster goes on for an extended period, is common in history.
Still, Republicans haven’t always been like this. In the 1930s they
denounced the New Deal and called for free-market solutions — but when
Alf Landon accepted the 1936 presidential nomination, he also emphasized
the “plain duty” of “caring for the unemployed until recovery is attained.” Can you imagine hearing anything similar from today’s G.O.P.?
Is it race? That’s always a hypothesis worth considering in American politics. It’s true that most of the unemployed are white, and they make up an even larger share
of those receiving unemployment benefits. But conservatives may not
know this, treating the unemployed as part of a vaguely defined,
dark-skinned crowd of “takers.”
My
guess, however, is that it’s mainly about the closed information loop
of the modern right. In a nation where the Republican base gets what it
thinks are facts from Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, where the party’s
elite gets what it imagines to be policy analysis from the American
Enterprise Institute or the Heritage Foundation, the right lives in its
own intellectual universe, aware of neither the reality of unemployment
nor what life is like for the jobless. You might think that personal
experience — almost everyone has acquaintances or relatives who can’t
find work — would still break through, but apparently not.
Whatever
the explanation, Mr. Boehner was clearly saying what he and everyone
around him really thinks, what they say to each other when they don’t
expect others to hear. Some conservatives have been trying to reinvent
their image, professing sympathy for the less fortunate. But what their
party really believes is that if you’re poor or unemployed, it’s your
own fault.
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