Of course making $10 an hour only delays losing everything a very short time and a poor soul could be busting his ass on the slave wage job and miss out on a real job. I'd become a professional hit man before I'd live the rest of my life making $10 an hour. Well maybe not a hitman but I'd find something.
I thought the Democratic position on continuing unemployment benefits was to keep creating jobs? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUAG3Fqz56s Actually if you're a musician or creative type person you should try to get fired from your job, so you can collect unemployment thus creating jobs for the economy while you pursue your desire to be creative all the time knowing you will have healthcare http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKrBvmVw5-g&feature=related
1. The President does approve it, but congress proposes it. So Bush and his Democratic congress (in our example) were both responsible. 2. I was referring to an estimated amount Obama has added since taking over...or rather that the democrats in the congress proposed, and he approved. 3. And since you want to mince words to get exact stats instead of the general idea of the issue, please provide reliable sources that show we would have lost millions of jobs had the auto industry failed. Please provide reliable sources that indicate anyone who proposed firing millions of federal employees. That is, if you're nitpicking to ensure everything in our conversations is hyper-accurate. Lastly, I could not agree more: The best place to start would have been to correct Bush's mistakes and go from there. However, Obama's promise of "Hope and Change" was more of the same. Except now that it's being done by a liberal President, it's ok with the left.
The thing about a minimum wage job is that at the end of the day you're too tired to work on a hobby or personal improvement and invest in a better future. That is why minimum wage is a dead end job.
By the same token, offering three years of benefits at a level which makes lower scale employment unattractive is simply not sustainable. Please take a look at US Federal expenditures and the annual GDP - taxes on the rich, even at 100%, are futile at this rate.
I'm going to offer a perspective from that of a homesteader, since that is what (for better or for worse) I am becoming. It's a draft, I'm trying to slam down a quick lunch in my office. We have grown our economy to its present size by buying and selling many, many goods and services we don't actually need. We have robots and cheap Chinese labor harvesting and making most of what we do need. So when recession hits, people stop buying what they don't need, making the recession worse (or better I guess one could argue). So at the present time, we simply have too many people around who are not needed to produce the basics. Thus, they're not able to earn anything. Without money in their pockets I do not see how we can get the, hmm... luxury economy going again. I believe the stimulus could have worked, had it been larger at the outset, or, more importantly, if the money had been put more directly into the pockets of the 70-percenters (consumers).
Ah yes, the Keynesian answer to all failed stimulus. "It should have been larger". How about NOT bailing everyone and everything out and letting the economy reset? More painful for the short run, providing a healthy backdrop going forward - just like quitting the heroin an addict needs. Painful withdrawal, but the patient is cured later on.
The ensuing chaos would just make us easy prey for other nations. We should be saving money during expansions, so we have something to keep us chugging along during contractions. It works at home, it would work nationally.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget United States federal budget The Budget of the United States Government is the President's proposal to the U.S. Congress which recommends funding levels for the next fiscal year, beginning October 1.