Time for Democrats to pick another fight over unemployment benefits

By Herman Cain —— Bio and Archives December 30, 2013

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We talked on Friday about how desperately Democrats want to change the subject to anything but ObamaCare, so it’s a pretty exciting time for them when unemployment benefits once again run out. That’s because the latest expiration of the program is yet the latest opportunity for them to bash Republicans who raise objections to once again extending it.

Unemployment benefits are supposed to be a state program that lasts for 26 weeks. The idea is that a person who has lost his or her job should have a safety net to fall back on during a period of transition, and indeed workers and employers pay into the unemployment system so that it actually functions somewhat like real insurance. (Unlike ObamaCare, but that’s another story.) The reason for the 26-week limit is we don’t want a safety net to become a hammock. Six months is in most cases a reasonable period of time for a person to find a new job. The “long-term unemployed” present a different set of societal problems, which unemployment insurance is not designed to address. But since the economic meltdown of 2008 and President Obama’s first election, Democrats have been successfully demanding Washington-led extensions of unemployment benefits, always with expiration dates, which always arrive accompanied by a new Democrat-led demand for another extension.

The argument has been that because we are in an economic “emergency,” it is simply unconscionable to let benefits expire, regardless of the fact that they were only designed to last 26 weeks for anyone who receives them. The Democrats’ real goal here is twofold. First, it benefits them politically when more people are dependent on the federal government in order to meet their basic needs. When you can’t get by without a check from the government, you vote Democrat. Second, and much more importantly from Democrats’ perspective, it gives them a regular opportunity to pick a fight with Republicans that they’re sure they can’t lose. This is the one that will focus on emotion and individual anecdotes that tug at the heart. Democrats are experts at trotting out these stories and they always get lots of help from the media, who will go around and interview desperate families pleading for more help lest they lose all hope. The substantive argument against the extension is hard to refute with logic. It is simply bad policy to institute a program that is designed to be short-term, then keep extending it in perpetuity. It goes against every principle of good budgeting. It goes against everything we know about human nature and incentives. And it really destroys the idea that unemployment benefits function as an insurance-type program for which people submit claims after they and their employers pay into the system. By instituting this never-ending series of extensions, Democrats turn into nothing more than a federal welfare program. And by the way, the Congressional Budget Office estimates it will cost $19 billion to extend it through 2014. What’s more, the idea that we’re still in an “emergency” goes against everything else Obama claims about the performance of the economy under his watch. If things are getting so much better as he says, why is it still an emergency? The fact that the U-6 “real” unemployment rate, which includes those who are underemployed or have given up looking, still hovers around 14 percent demonstrates that Obama’s policies aren’t working at all – and that includes the perpetual extension of unemployment benefits. But Democrats don’t care about any of this. All they care about is the opportunity to point their fingers at Republicans and say, “Are you really going to put these people out in the street?” And Republicans, many of whom understand perfectly well the argument I just made against the extension, will likely buckle because they don’t think they can persuade the public of that position. And at any rate, they don’t want to give Democrats a chance to change the subject from ObamaCare. That’s why the GOP agreed to a horrible budget deal, and that’s why they’ll probably agree to this too. In an election year in which Republicans have decided nothing can be allowed to get in the way of an ObamaCare-dominated narrative, it appears they’ll give Democrats almost anything else they want if it means not letting them change the subject.