Here’s another NYT story about unemployment benefits drying up. A 62-year old man on his last check walking around handing out resumes.
“It is almost 100 degrees out there, and I am walking door to door handing out résumés,” said Mr. Ballesteros, who worked for 21 years at a nonprofit group in Tucson before getting laid off when funding dried up. “Now Arizona decided to kill the benefits extension from the federal government because some legislator decided we’re just sitting around on our butts waiting for a check.”
That last extension of unemployment benefits — typically received in weeks 80 through 99 of unemployment — is paid for entirely with federal money and does not affect state budgets. But because of ideological opposition and other legislative priorities, Arizona and a handful of other states, like Wisconsin and Alaska, have not made the one-word change necessary to keep the program going.
“Paid for entirely with federal money and does not affect state budgets”. Gee, I guess that means the money didn’t come from the taxpayer. Or it isn’t borrowed. Or maybe it doesn’t have to be paid back. It’s free. And only “ideological opposition and other legislative priorities” stand between the poor man and his check.
Certainly people on their last check are too desperate to care where the next one comes from, provided it comes. But that doesn’t change the fact that money isn’t free. It was never free. The NYT quotes a Congressman who says:
Some Arizona lawmakers expressed discomfort with the prospect of accepting more federal money.
“This is not free money,” said Al Melvin, a Republican state senator representing Tucson. “This is America’s money. We have a $14 trillion debt that has to be paid, and we need to stop spending money we don’t have.”
If the slavery or the union was the key issue of the 1860s, the existence (or nonexistence) of free money is probably the single most contentious issue of our times. The dispute runs through the European crisis. Greece believes in free money. And why not? They’ve seen enough of it to know free money exists. But the Germans have worked long enough to think that money must be earned.
The problem is that the believers in free money and the adherents of earned money can’t convince each other of their respective points of view. For the free moneyists, prosperity consists of pumping enough free money into the system to allow people to earn money again. For the earned moneyists, every free dollar given out is one more dollar that somebody has to pay back.
I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other. Either the opponents of free money will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new — North as well as South
