Creating Jobs by Paying Those without Jobs 
is a Strange Strategy

Create 300,000 jobs by keeping 2.1 million people on unemployment benefits? That's the strategy America is considering.

The rationale is that those receiving the unemployment benefits will be spending the money, thus creating the jobs. Problems with the argument? First, unless you are adding new benefits -- not just extending old ones -- you aren't creating jobs, but just preserving them. Second, would the 300,000 jobs actually fall out of the economy, or just be be paid less? 

It cannot be doubted, though, that extending the unemployment benefits does result in some stimulus to the economy, just as injecting any money does. But, is it all inflationary spending? Are the unemployed creating any products, any services, or are they, themselves, doing anything but spending printed money?

The extension of the unemployment benefits will end Dec. 29, unless Congress acts, leaving many needy people without the income during the holiday season. Some would suggest this would make Uncle Sam into a Christmas Grinch.

I suggest, though, this is not the way to expand the economy. If it is such a great solution, surely we can search through our homeless population, and our working-but-underpaid populace, and come up with many more, add them to our welfare rolls, and really grow our economy.

Of course, I realize the real need in extending benefits is not to grow the economy, but to care for those who are not employed. But, when will it ever cross our noggin that the way to solve unemployment is to provide employment? For all these many decades, now, our solution for unemployment has been to pay people to be unemployed. You might argue that it is not to pay them to be unemployed, but to pay them because they are unemployed and cannot find employment, but I would say that, still, the better solution is to give them jobs.

It's the old story of, if you give a hungry person a fish, he will eat it and be back hungry the next morning. But, if you teach him to fish, he will be out getting his own fish that very next day.