There’s been a lot of talk about bootstraps in the economic debate: pull yourself up by your bootstraps, get a job, quit whining, work harder. But what if that isn’t enough? By the end of this year, Congress is expected to vote on whether to extend unemployment benefits to 99 weeks.
Most states currently provide up to 26 weeks of benefits. Since the recession started, Congress has voted to allow up to 73 weeks in the hardest-hit states.
The reason for this is that our welfare system is not equipped to deal with a recession of this magnitude. The bootstraps argument, besides being physically impossible, is null and void.
Extending the benefit payments may not be the best answer. Putting some people to work through temporary projects such as those proposed by President Obama in September’s American Jobs Act would help. The AJA would also help keep teachers, firefighters and police officers in their jobs, which would greatly help unemployment numbers in fields that have been cut by struggling local governments.
Jobless reports now say that only 48 percent of America’s unemployed are receiving government benefits. This is down from 75 percent last year, meaning that a growing number of unemployed have been jobless for so long that they no longer qualify for government benefits.
Opponents of welfare may say that this benefit cutoff is a good thing, that now the unemployed who have lived off of government checks will actually get a job. In order to respond to this argument, we need to bust some myths about welfare.
There has been a myth circulating that 50 percent of American households pay no income taxes. That number is not wrong, but it only looks at income taxes, not payroll taxes, investment taxes and many others. The stimulus programs that began under President George W. Bush and continued under President Obama increased the number of households who have claimed enough tax credits to avoid paying income taxes. But if every other federal tax is included, only about 10 percent of households pay no net federal taxes.
There are fewer “free riders” than many people would like to admit.
There also seems to have been a misunderstanding on part of the middle class about Occupy Wall Street protesters’ “99%” campaign. The OWS protesters should probably clarify that people who have started their own businesses, working hard to move up in life, who pay their taxes and live within their means are not part of the one percent.
The one percent are, perhaps shockingly to some, not very many. These are the bank CEOs whose incomes have spiked by almost 300 percent since 1980 while the rest of the country remained fairly stagnant. There is no fighting the numbers, which show that the gap between the rich and poor has widened to the greatest it’s been since 1928, the year before the Great Depression.
We can’t ignore that the neo-liberal economic policies that began under President Ronald Reagan has done more to hurt the poor than help them. What this means is that it is more difficult than ever to find and keep a job, let alone a job you are not over-qualified for.
In the last few decades there has been a push to encourage more and more students toward college. What we are saddled with now is a large educated workforce and an economy with not enough jobs to go around, no matter how hard those college students have worked. No amount of bootstrapping will magically create jobs.
The fact is that it’s not the college-educated who have made the significant gains in this economy. It’s that pesky one percent again.
A graph from the Congressional Budget Office shows that while those in the bottom 80 percentile of income have lost 10 percent of average income shares since 1979, the top one percent have gained 10 percent.
Since the number of college graduates since 1979 is much larger than one percent of the population, it is easy to see that working hard in college does not guarantee a passage to the one percent.
It is also important to note that recent college graduates are generally not entitled to unemployment benefits, because they are seeing full-time employment for the first time.
When I hear people calling the unemployed lazy, entitled or whiny, I wonder if they still buy into the Occupy Wall Street stereotype: the only angry ones are college bums looking for a handout.
Tell that to Jon Polis, a warehouse worker from East Greenwich, R.I., who lost his job as a warehouse worker in 2008. Polis is 55 years old and has run out of unemployment benefits, which helped him pay for groceries and health insurance. “Employers are crying out for qualified help,” Polis told Huffington Post reporter Christopher S. Rugaber. But the employers interviewing him were not willing to train Polis on the computer skills he needed for a job.
There are many like Jon Polis in America today. The unemployment rate for people aged 55 and older increased sharply since the recession began, to an average of around seven percent. Traditionally, people of this age were in steady enough jobs to weather economic turmoil. But this recession is so severe and has gone on for so long that even the most experienced and qualified workers worry about their job security.
So the next time you see Occupy Wall Street protesters, don’t think of dirty dreadlocks or Phish t-shirts. Think of people like Jon Polis, the ones who worked hard for decades and are losing out on what should be the peak of all their years of hard work. They have medications and higher health insurance rates now. But their benefits have gone to pay the salaries of the top one percent.
Think of him the next time you say you shouldn’t have to help the less fortunate simply because you worked hard.
If that isn’t entitlement, then I don’t know what is.
Kelsey Allagood can be reached at kallagood@spartans.ut.edu.