UNEMPLOYMENT BENEFITS DRY UP BY 2011
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Protect the Middle Class: Stop Exporting Our Jobs, Stop Importing Foreign Workers and Give Our Children a
Working Future!
Alert: 25 states forced to borrow $24 billion to keep issuing checks
Despite Obama administration hype that the U.S. economy is in "recovery," U.S. Department of Labor
studies indicate that the continued high level of unemployment will cause 40 state programs to go broke
within the next two years, requiring $90 billion in federal loans to keep writing unemployment insurance
checks.
Currently, 25 states that have run out of unemployment money have been forced to borrow $24 billion from
the federal government to cover the gaps, according to the Washington Post.
Long-term unemployment
Lost in the Obama administration's touting that unemployment had dropped to 10.0 percent in November,
down from 10.2 percent in October, is the growing crisis in long-term unemployment defined as those out of
work for six months or longer.
The long-term jobless now account for 38.2 percent of the unemployed. If the long-term unemployed remain
without a job, the Bureau of Labor Statistics simply drops them from the unemployment count altogether,
assuming they are unemployed so long that they have effectively dropped out of the labor force.
Red Alert has previously reported that despite an official unemployment rate of 27 percent, the real
unemployment rate in Detroit is closer to 50 percent, after taking into account those who have given up
finding a job and those working fewer hours than they want, according to Detroit Mayor Dave Bing.
Red Alert reported in November that Detroit has become an inner city "dead zone" of Democratic voting.
A permanent underclass
Red Alert is concerned that states are increasingly going to be burdened with a permanent underclass of
unemployable workers that face no alternative but to live permanently on government-funded welfare.
In 1984, political scientist Charles Murray published "Losing Ground," a book sharply critical of Lyndon
Johnson's War on Poverty that argued we should scrap all social welfare programs.
Murray's argument was that social welfare programs by their very nature created a "poverty culture,"
especially in African-American families, where the welfare state itself was actually encouraging the breakup
of families by implementing qualifying rules detrimental to family development, as conditions for receiving
welfare itself.
Murray took the opposite approach, arguing that all federal entitlement "transfer programs" to the poor
should be terminated for working-aged people immediately, including Medicare, food stamps,
unemployment insurance, workers compensation, subsidized housing, disability insurance, as well as a
myriad of others.
Murray argued this not from a lack of sympathy with the poor, but from an intellectual conviction that the only
way to solve poverty was to leave the poor with no recourse except for the job market, family members and
friends, as well as charity and whatever aid for the poor our unemployed the states decided to provide.
Red Alert is convinced it is time to consider abandoning altogether the very entitlement programs the Obama
administration is determined to expand before cities like Detroit become the harbinger for what all U.S. inner
cities may look like in one generation from now.
Globalists admit U.S. workers are suffering
An important article in the Council of Foreign Relations Foreign Affairs magazine was published in the
July/August 2007 issue by Kenneth F. Scheve, a political science professor at Yale University, and Matthew J.
Slaughter, an economics professor at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth and a senior fellow for
business and globalization at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Scheve and Slaughter argued that as a result of globalization, income in the U.S. has become "extremely
skewed." Incomes for most workers have stagnated, or in many cases fallen, they argued.
The numbers are "stark," Scheve and Slaughter had to admit. Less than four percent of workers were in
educational groups that enjoyed increased real money earnings from 2000 to 2005. Only workers with
doctorates and professional graduate degree saw increases in real money earnings, while the earnings of
all other classes of workers fell.
In other words, when the earnings were put in "real dollars," a standard that was designed to factor out
inflation, globalization has caused the vast majority of U.S. workers, some 96.6 percent, to see their
earnings fall between 2000 and 2005.
The only workers to experience income gains under globalism were at the very top, those with doctorates or
top professional degrees, including law degrees and business school degrees.
Ironically, these highly educated workers were also likely to be the most successful competitors for jobs
managing or advising multinational corporations outsourcing jobs to foreign workers.
The authors found a rising number of Americans are asking themselves, "Is globalism good for me?"
Increasingly, the conclusion is that it's not. (WND)
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