re: #191 Charles

“Unemployment” is not welfare. When you get paid at your job, part of the money withheld from your check is unemployment insurance. If you’re laid off, you’re entitled to collect that money — it’s yours. You earned it by working.

You are exactly right. One of the little nasty facts about a capitalistic economic system is that it *requires* a certain amount of unemployment. It keeps wages down. So long as businesses benefit by having a pool of unemployed people, hopefully temporarily low in number, it is incumbent for the government to provide benefits for them to, as the preamble clearly states, provide for the common good. It helps the pool and it helps the overall economy by keeping them in the loop as consumers, however diminished. This is what Clinton addressed with welfare reform in the mid ‘90’s. He adopted what was a Republican idea and jammed it through a very hostile Democratic minority in Congress. But he was right to do so. Unemployment benefits should be a bridge until the business cycle rights itself.